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OUIDA’S WORKS. 


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Strathmore 1.50 

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Id ALIA . . 1.50 

Under Two Flags 1.50 

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These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the most 
powerful and fasejiiating works of fiction which the present 
century, so prolific in light reading, has produced. 

The above are handsomely and uniformly bound in cloth, 
12mo form, and are for sale by booksellers generally, or will 
be sent by mail, postage paid, on receipt of price by 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., Publishers, 

715 and 717 Market St.y Philadelphia. 


S I G E" A. 


A STORY. 


By ^^OUIDA/’ 


CARED,” ^^FOLLE- 


AUTHOR OP "STRATHMORE,” " TRICOTRIN,” " PASCARE 
FARINE,” "under TWO FLAG^j^ " IDAI 


kA 


CVi 


\ 1 


Getto una palma al mare, e mi va nel fondo. 

Agli altri vedo il piombo navigare.” 

Tuscan Son0. 

I throw a palm into the sea : the deeps devour it 
Others throw lead, and lo! it buoyant sails. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
1876 . 


i 


£) O’ S\ 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by 
J, B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 


S I G N A. 


CHAPTER I. 

He was only a little lad coming singing through the summer 
weather ; singing as the birds do in the thickets, as the grilli 
do in the corn at night, as the acacia bees do all the day long 
in the high tree-tops in the sunshine. 

Only a little lad, with brown eyes and bare feet and a wistful 
heart, driving his sheep and his goats, and carrying his sheaves 
of cane or millet, and working among the ripe grapes when 
the time came, like all the rest, here in the bright Signa 
country. 

Few people care much for our Signa and all it has seen and 
known. Few people even know anything of it at all, except 
just vaguely as a mere name. Assisi has her saint, and Peru- 
gia her painters, and Arezzo her poet, and Sienna her virgin, 
and Settignano her sculptor, and Prato her great Carmelite, 
and Vespignano her inspired shepherd, and Fiesole her angel- 
monk, and the village Vinci her mighty master ; and poets 
write of them all for the sake of the dead fame which they 
embalm. But Signa has found no poet, though her name lies 
in the pages of the old chroniclers like a jewel in an old 
king’s tomb. 

It is so old, our Signa, no man could chronicle all it has 
seen in the centuries ; but not one in ten thousand travelers 
thinks about it. Its people plait straw for the world, and the 
train from the coast runs through it : that is all that it has to 
do with other folks. Passengers come and go from the sea to 
the city, from the city to the sea, along the great iron highway, 
and perhaps they glance at the stern, ruined walls, at the white 
houses on the cliffs, at the broad river with its shining sands, 
at the blue hills with the poplars at their base and the pines 

1 * 6 


6 


SIGNA. 


at their summits, and they say to one another that this is 
Signa. 

But it is all that they ever do ; it is only a glance, then on 
they go through the green and golden haze of Valdarno. Signa 
is nothing to them, only a place that they stop at a second. 
And yet Signa is worthy of knowledge. She is so ancient 
and so wise, and in her way so beautiful too ; and she holds 
so many great memories in her ; she has so many faded laurel- 
boughs, as women in their years of age keep the dead rose- 
leaves of their days of love ; and once on a time — in the Bc- 
public’s time, as her sons will still turn from the plow or rest 
on the oar to tell to a stranger with pride — she was a very 
Amazon or Artemis of the mountains, setting her breast 
boldly against all faces, and they were many, who came down 
over the wild western road from the sea or from the Apen- 
nines with reddened steel and blazing torch to harry and fire 
the fields and spread famine and war to the gates of Florence. 
These days are gone. The years of its glory are done. It is 
a gray, quiet place, which now strays down by the water and 
now climbs high on the hill, and faces the full dawn of the day 
and sees the sunset reflected in the mirror of the river, and is 
starry with fire-flies in midsummer, and at noon looks drowsy 
in the heat and seems to dream, — being so very old. The but- 
tressed walls are ruins. The mass-bell swings over the tower 
roofs. The fortresses are changed to farms. The vines climb 
where the culverins blazed. White bullocks' and belled mules 
tread to and fro the tracks which the free-lances made ; and 
the peasants sing at their plows where the hosts of the invaders 
once thundered. 

Its ways are narrow, its stones are crooked, its summer dust 
is dense, its winter mire is heavy, its hovels are many, its 
people are poor, — oh, yes, no doubt, — but it is beautiful in 
various ways, and worthy of a scholar’s thought and of an 
artist’s tenderness. Only the poet does not come to make it 
quoted and, beloved by the world, as one single line on the 
drifting autumn leaves has rendered Vallombrosa. 

Here where the ancient walls of its citadel rise hoary and 
broken against the blueness of the sky ; there where the arches 
of the bridges span the river, and the sand and the shallows 
and the straw that is drying in summer shine together yellow 
in the sun ; here where under the sombre pointed archways 


SIGNA. 


7 


the little children play, their faces like the cherubs and the 
cupids of the Renaissance ; there where’ the cobblers and 
coopers and the plaiting maidens and the makers of the yellow 
birch brooms all work away under lintels and corbels and carved 
beam timbers six hundred years old if one ; here where 
through the gateways with their portcullises woven over by 
the spiders there only pass the patient mules with sacks of flour, 
or the hay-carts dropping grasses, or the wagons of new wine ; 
there where the' villas that were all fortresses in the fierce 
fighting times of old gleam white in the light upon their crests 
of hills, with their cypresses like sentinels around them, and 
breadths of corn and vineyards traversed by green grassy paths, 
that lead upward to where the stone pine and the myrtle make 
sweet the air together, — in all these Signa is beautiful ; most 
of all, of course, in the long light radiant summer, when the 
nightingales are singing everywhere, noon as well as night, — 
the summer which seems to last almost all the year, for you 
can only tell how it comes and goes by the coming and the 
going of the flowers ; the long-lived summer that is ushered 
in by the dafibdils, those golden chamberlains of the court of 
flowers, and dies, as a king should, on a purple bed of anem- 
ones, when the bells of the feast of the saints sound its re- 
quiem from hill to hill. And Signa revels in all that bright- 
ness of the Tuscan weather, and all about her seems singing, 
from the cicala piping away all day long, through the hottest 
heat, to the mandolins that thrill through the leaves at night 
as the peasants go by strumming the chords of their love- 
songs. Summer and song and sunshine, — Signa lies amidst 
them like some war-bruised shield of a knight that has fallen 
among the roses and holds the nest of a lark. 

One day in summer Signa kept the feast of the Corpus 
Domini with more pomp and praise than usual. The bells 
were ringing all over the plain and upon the hill-sides, and the 
country-people were coming in from all the villages that lie 
scattered like so many robins’ nests among the olives and the 
maize and the arbutus thickets everywhere around. They 
were like figures out of a Fra Bartolommeo or a Ghirlandajo 
as they came down, through the ripening corn and the 
red poppies, from the old gray buildings up above, in their 
trailing white dresses and their hoods of blue, with the unlit 
tapers in their hands, and the little white-robed children run- 


8 


SIGNA. 


ning before them with their chaplets of flowers still wet from 
the dew. 

It was the procession of Demeter transmitted through all 
the ages, though it was called the feast of Christ ; it might 
have beerv the songs of Ceres that they sang, and Virgil might 
have looked upon them with a smile of praise as they passed 
through the waving wheat and under the boughs red with 
cherries. 

The old faith lives under the new, and the old worship is 
not dead, here in the country of Horace and in the fields where 
Proserpine wandered. The people are Pagan still ; only now 
they call it being Christian. 

It was fairest summer weather. There was sure harvest and 
promise of abundant vintage. The sweet strong west wind 
was blowing from the sea, but not too roughly, only just 
enough to shake the scent out of the acacia-blossoms and fan 
open the oleanders. 

The peasantry were in good heart, and trooped down to the 
Feast of the Body of God from the loneliest farmstead on the 
highest hill-crest ; and from every villa chapel set along the 
mountains or among the green sea of the valley vines there 
was a bell ringing above an open door. 

The chief celebration was at Signa, which had broken from 
its usual ways, and had music on this great service because a 
cardinal bishop had come on a visit in its neighborhood, and 
all its roads and streets and lanes were swept and garnished 
and watered, and at many open casements there were pots of 
lilies, white and orange, and in many dark archways groups of 
little children on whose tiny shoulders it would have seemed 
quite natural to see such wings of rose or azure as II Beato 
gave his cherubim. 

The procession came out from the white walls above on the 
cliff", and down the steep way of the hill and across the bridge, 
and through the Lastra to the little church of the Misericordia. 
There were great silk banners waving heavily ; gold fringe that 
shone and swayed ; priests’ vestments that gleamed with silver 
and color ; masses of flowers and leaves borne aloft ; curling 
croziers and crimson baldacchini ; and then came all the white- 
clothed contadini, by tens, by twenties, by hundreds, and the 
cherubic children singing in the sun ; it was Signa in the 
Middle Ages once again, and Fra Giovanni might have stood 


SIONA. 


9 


by and painted it all in a choral book, or Marcillat have put it 
in a stained window, and have illumined it with the azure sky 
for its background, and the rays of the morning sun, like beams 
that streamed straight to earth from the throne of God. 

The procession came down the hill and across the bridge, 
with its irregular arches and its now shallow green water shin- 
ing underneath, and on its sands the straw lying drying, and 
beyond it the near hills with their dusky pines, and the white 
streaks where the quarries were cut, and the blue haze of the 
farther mountains. 

All the people were chanting the Laus Deo, — chanting with 
chests made strong by the mountain air, and lips made tuneful 
by the inheritance of melody ; men and women and children 
were all singing, from the old white-haired bishop who bore 
the host, to the four-year-old baby that trod on the hem of its 
mother’s dress. 

But above all the voices there rose one sweetest and clearest 
of all, and going up into heaven, as it seemed, as a lark’s does 
on a summer morning. He was only a little fellow that sang, 
— a little boy of the Lastra a Signa, poorer than all the rest ; 
with his white frock clean, but very coarse, and a wreath of 
Scarlet poppies on his auburn curls ; a very little fellow, ten 
years old at most, with thin brown limbs and a lean wistful 
face, and the straight brows of his country, with dark eyes 
full of dreams beneath them, and naked feet that could be fleet 
as a hare’s over the dry yellow grass or the crooked sharp 
stones. 

He was always hungry, and never very strong, and certainly 
simple and poor as a creature could be, and he knew what a 
beating meant as well as any dog about the farm. He lived 
with people who thrashed him oftener than they fed him. He 
was almost always scolded, and bore the burden of others’ 
faults. He had never had a whole shirt or a pair of shoes in 
all his life. He kept goats on one of the dusky sweet-scented 
hillsides above Signa, and bore, like them, the wind and the 
weather, the scorch and the storm. And yet, by God’s grace 
and the glory of childhood, he was happy enough as he went 
over the bridge and through the white dust, chanting his psalm 
in the rear of the priests, in the ceremonies of the Corpus 
Domini. 

For the music was in his head and in his heart j and the 

A* 


10 


SIQNA. 


millioDS of leaves and the glancing water seemed to be singing 
with him, and he did not feel the flints under his feet, or the 
heat of them, as he went singing out all his little soul to the 
river and the sky and the glad June sunshine, and he was 
quite happy, though he was of no more moment in the great 
human world than any one of the brown grilli in the wheat 
or tufts of rosemary in the quarry-side ; and he did not feel 
the sharpness of the stones underneath his feet or the scorch 
of them as he went barefoot along the streets, because he was 
always looking up at the brightness of the sky, and expecting 
to see it open and to see the faces of the curly-headed winged 
children peep out from behind the sun-rays as they did in the 
old pictures in the villa chapels. 

The priests told him he would see them for a certainty if he 
were good ; and he had been good, or at least had tried to be, 
but the heavens never had opened yet. 

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very 
hungry, and have many sticks to beat you and no mother’s 
lips to kiss you. 

But he tried in his own small way. "When he carried the 
bright-blue plums to the market, nOt to taste even one when 
his mouth was parched with the dust and the sun ; when he 
let his reed-flute lie mute while he searched for a straying kid ; 
to tell the truth, though it cost him a thrashing ; to leave his 
black bread untouched on a feast morning, though he was so 
hungry, because he was going to confession ; to forbear from 
pulling the ripe grapes as he went along the little grass paths 
through the vines ; — these were the things that were so hard, 
and that he tried his best to do, because in his little dim mind 
he saw what was just, and in his way endeavored with all his 
might to follow it, that he might see the faces of the angels 
some day ; .and he wondered now why he could not see the 
cherubs through the blue smiling sky, as the old fresco-painters 
had done who did not want it half so much as he did, because 
no doubt the painters were wise men, and knew a great deal, 
and were very happy, and were not like him, who was always 
wanting to know everything, and could never get any one 
to tell. 

The old painters would have painted him, and would have 
made a cherub of him. with his wreath of poppies and his 
wondering eyes and his little singing mouth, and would have 


SIGNA. 


11 


taken all the leanness out of his face and the paleness out of 
his cheeks and the darns out of his little coarse frock, and 
would have made his field-flowers roses of paradise, and would 
have glorified him and made him a joy to the wondering 
world forever. 

But he did not know that ; he did not know that the 
painters never saw any other little angels than just such foot- 
tired and sun-tanned little angels as he, which their genius 
lifted up and transfigured into the likeness of the children 
of God. 

He did not know that Fra Angelico would have kissed him 
and Raffaello would have put him forever in the internal sun- 
shine of the Loggie, with gold rays about his head and the 
lilies of Mary in his hands. 

He only looked up — in vain — for the cherubs in the shin- 
ing morning skies, and was sorry that he was not good enough 
to have the right to see them, and yet was glad at heart as he 
went carrying his taper in the rear of the silken banners and 
the silvered robes and the chanting contadini over the green 
sun-lightened Arno water, with the midsummer corn blowing 
on all the hills around, and the west wind bringing the salt of 
the sea with it to strengthen the young bud-clusters of the 
vine. 

Glad, — because he was so young, and because he was sure 
of one creature that loved him, and because the music thrilled 
him to his heart’s delight, and because it was a happiness to 
him only to sing, as it is to the thrush in the depths of the 
woods when the day dawns, or to the nightingale when she 
drinks the dew in heats of noon oflf the snow of a magnolia- 
flower. 

He had a little lute of his own, given to him by the only 
hand that ever gave him anything. Where he lived he might 
not play it, on pain of its being broken ; but upon the hills he 
did, and along the country roads ; and when people were asleep 
in their beds in Signa, they would be awakened by notes that 
were not the birds’ rippling up the street in the sweet, silent 
dark, and going higher and higher and higher: it was only the 
little fellow playing and singing as he went along in the dusk 
of the dawn to his work. 

In the Lastra no one thought anything of it. In any other 
country, lattices would have been opened and heads hung out 


12 


SIONA. 


and breaths of deep pleasure held to listen better, because the 
child’s music was wonderful in its way, or at least would have 
been so elsewhere. But here there is so much music every- 
where : nobody noticed much. It was no more than a hundred 
other lutes strumming at cottage doors, than a thousand other 
stornelli or rispetti sung as the oxen were yoked. 

There is always song somewhere. 

As the straw-wagon creaks down the hill, the wagoner will 
chant to the corn that grows upon either side of him. As the 
miller’s mules cross the bridge, the lad as he cracks his whip 
will hum to the blowing alders. In the red clover, the laborers 
will whet their scythes and sickles to a trick of melody. In 
the quiet evenings a Kyrie eleison will rise from the thick 
leaves that hide a village chapel. On the hills the goatherd, 
high in air, among the arbutus branches will scatter on the 
lonely mountain-side stanzas of purest rhythm. By the sea- 
shore, where Shelley died, the fisherman, rough and salt and 
weatherworn, will sing notes of sweetest measure under the 
tamarisk-tree on his mandolin. But the poetry and the music 
float on the air like the leaves of roses that blossom in a soli- 
tude and drift away to die upon the breeze ; there is no one to 
notice the fragrance, there is no one to gather the leaves. 

The songs of the people now are like their fire-flies in sum- 
mer. They make night beautiful all over the dusky hills, and 
the seas of vine, and the blowing fields of maize, in a million 
lonely places of the mountains and the plains. But the fire- 
flies are born in the corn and die in it; few eyes see their 
love-fires, except those of the nightingale and the shrew mouse. 

Theocritus cried aloud on his Sicilian muses, and the world 
heard him and has treasured the voice of his sweet com- 
plaining. But the muse of these people now lives with the 
corncrake under the wheat and the swallow under the house- 
eaves, and is such a simple natural home-born thing that they 
think of her no more than the fire-fly does of her luminance. 
And so they have no Theocritus, but only ever-renewing bursts 
of song everywhere as the millet grows ripe, and the lemon- 
tree flowers, and the red poppies leap with the corn. 

Often they do not know what they sing : — Does the fire- fly 
know that she burns? 

This little fellow did not know what he sang. 

He did not know what he was. 


SIONA. 


13 


At home he was always being told that he had no right to 
exist at all : perhaps he had not ; he did not know. 

Himself, he thought God had made him to sing, made him 
just for that; as he made the finches and nightingales. But 
he did not tell any one so. At home they would have asked 
him what should the great God want with his puny oat pipe, 
Toto could make as good a, noise cutting a reed in the fields 
any day. 

Perhaps Toto could. He thought his own voice better, but 
he was not sure. He was only glad to sing, because all the 
world seemed singing with him, and all the sky seemed one 
vast space of sweetest sound, — as, perhaps, it seems to a bird : 
who knows? 

When he went to bed in the hay he could hear the nightin- 
gales and the owls and the grilli singing all together in the trees 
behind the village and in the fields that stretched by the 
river ; and in the dusk of the dawn when he ran out with his 
little bare feet, dripping with dew, there were a million little 
voices hymning in the day. That was what he heard. Other 
people, no doubt, heard cart-wheels, and grinding mills, and the 
scolding of women, and the barking of dogs, and the creaking of 
doors, and a thousand other discordant things ; but to him the 
world was full of the singing birds and the humming insects, 
and the blue heavens teemed with a choir of angels : he could 
not see them, but he heard them, and he knew they were near, 
and that was enough : he could wait. 

“ Do you hear anything up there ?” the other children would 
ask him, when he stood listening with his eyes lifted, and they 
could not see so much as a bird, and he would look back to 
them quite sorrowfully. 

“ Do you not hear, too ? You are deaf, then !” 

But the children of Signa would not allow that they were 
deaf, and pelted and fought him for saying so. Deaf, indeed ! 
when it was he who was the simpleton hearing a bird sing 
where none was. 

Were they deaf? or, was he dreaming? 

The children of Signa and he never agreed which was 
which. 

It is the old eternal quarrel between the poet and the world ; 
and the children were like the world, they were strong in num- 
bers ; since they could see no bird, they would have it there 


14 


SIGNA. 


could be no music, and they boxed his ears to cure him of 
hearing better than his neighbors. Only it did not cure him. 

His angels sang above him this day of the Corpus Domini, 
and he did not feel the sun hot on his bare head, nor the stones 
sharp under his bare feet, and he did not remember that he 
was hungry, and that he had been beaten that morning until 
the music ceased suddenly, and he dropped to earth out of the 
arms of the angels. 

Then he felt his bruises, and the want of food gnawed in 
him, and he gathered up his little white acolyte’s dress and 
ran as quickly as he could, the withering poppies shaking off 
his hair. 

He was only Pippa’s child. 


CHAPTER 11. 

There is wild weather in winter at Signa. The mountain 
streams brim over, and the great historic river sweeps out in 
fall flood, and the bitter Alpine wind tears like a living thing 
over the hills and across the plain. Not seldom the low-lying 
fields become sheets of dull tawny water, and the little ham- 
lets among them are all flooded, and from the clock-towers the 
tolling bells cry aloud for succor, while the low, white houses 
seem to float like boats. In these winters, if the harvests before 
have been bad, the people suffer much. They have little or 
no bread, and they eat the raw grain sometimes. 

The country looks like a lake in such weather when the 
floods are on ; only for ships there are churches, and the light- 
houses are the trees ; and like rocky islands in all directions 
the village roofs and the villa walls gleam red and shine gray 
in the rain. It is only a short winter, and the people know 
that when the floods rise and spread, then they will find com- 
pensation, later on, for them in the double richness of grass 
and measure of corn. 

Still, it is sad to see the finest steer of the herd dashed a 
lifeless dun-colored mass against the foaming piles of the 
bridge ; it is sad to see the young trees and the stacks of hay 


SIGNA. 


15 


whirled together against each other; it is sad to watch the 
broken crucifix and the cottage bed hurled like dead leaves on 
the waste of waters ; it is saddest of all to see the little curly 
head of a drowned child drift with the boughs and the sheep 
and the empty hencoop and the torn house-door down the 
furious course of the river. 

Signa has seen this through a thousand winters and more, in 
more or less violence, and looked on untouched herself ; high 
set on her hills like the fortress which she used to be in the 
old Republic days. 

In one of these wild brief winters, in a drenching night of 
rain, a woman came down on foot along the high-road that 
runs from the mountains, the old post-road by which one can 
travel to the sea, only no one now ever takes that way. In 
sunshine and mild weather it is a glorious road, shelving sheer 
to the river- valley on one side and on the other hung over with 
bold rocks and blufis dusky with ilex and pine ; and it winds 
and curves and descends and changes as only a mountain road 
can do, with the smell of its rosemary and its wild myrtle 
sweet at every turn. But on a winter’s night of rain it is very 
dreary, desolate and dark. 

The woman stumbled down it as best she might. 

She had come on foot by short stages all the way from the 
sea some forty miles over hill and plain. She carried a bundle 
with her, and never let go her hold on it, however wildly the 
wind seized and shook her, nor however roughly the rain 
blew her blind. For the bundle was a child. 

Now and then she stopped and leaned against the rocks or 
the stem of a tree and opened her cloak and looked at it ; her 
eyes had grown so used to the thick darkness that she could 
see the round of its little red cheek and the curve of its folded 
fist and the line of its closed eyelashes. She would stop a 
minute sometimes and bend her head and listen, if the wind 
lulled, to the breathing of its parted lips set close against her 
breast ; then she would take breath herself and go onward. 

The child was a year old, and a boy, and ' a heavy weight, 
and she was not a strong woman now, though she had once 
been so ; and she had walked all the way from the sea. She 
began to grow dizzy, and to feel herself stumble like a footsore 
mule that has been driven until he is stupid and has lost his 
sureness of step, and his capacity for safety of choice. She 


16 


SIGNA. 


was drenched through, and her clothes hung in a soaked dead 
weight upouL her. Even with all her care she could not keep 
the child quite dry. 

Somewhere through the darkness she could hear hells tolling 
the hour. It was eight o’clock, and she had been in hopes to 
reach Signa before th^ night fell. 

The child began to stir and cry. 

She stopped and loosened her poor garments and gave him 
her breast. When he grew pacified, she stumbled on again ; 
the child was quiet ; the rain beat on her naked bosom, but 
the child was content and quiet ; so she went on so. 

Sometimes she shivered. She could not help that. She 
wondered where the town was. She could not see the lights. 
In earlier years she had known the country step by step as 
only those can who are born in the air of it and tread it daily 
in their ways of work. But now she had forgotten how the 
old road ran. Her girlhood seemed so far away ; so very, very 
far. And yet she was only twenty-two years of age. 

But then life does not count by years. Some suffer a life- 
time in a day, and so grow old between the rising and the 
setting of a sun. 

She had gone over the road so many times in the warm 
golden dawns and the white balmy nights plaiting her wisps 
of straw, bare-headed in the welcome air, and with a poppy or 
a brier-rose set behind her ear for vanity’s sake rather than for 
the flower’s. But she had been long away, — though she was 
so young, — at least it seemed very long to her, and with 
absence she had lost all the peasant’s instinct of safe movement 
in the dark, which is as sure as an owl’s or an ass’s, and comes 
by force of long habits and long treading of the same familiar 
way. She was not sure of her road ; not even sure of her 
footing. The wind terrified her, and she heard the loud surge 
of the Arno waters below, beating and foaming in flood. She 
was weak too from long fatigue, and the weight of the water 
in her clothes and of the child in her arms pulled her 
earthward. 

No one passed by her. 

Every one was housed, except sentries on the church -towers 
watching the rising of the waters, and shepherds getting their 
cattle upward from the low-lying pastures on to the hills. 

She was all alone on the old sea-road, and if she were near 


SIGNA. 17 

the lights of Signa she could not see them for the steam and 
mist of the furious rain. 

But she walked on resolutely, stumbling often over the great 
loose stones. She did not care for herself. Life was over for her. 
She would have been glad to lie down and die where she was. 
But if the boy were not under some roof before morning, she 
knew he would perish of cold in her arms. For she could 
give him so little warmth herself. She shivered in all her 
veins and all her limbs ; and she was soaked through like a 
drowned thing, and he was wet also. So she went on, growing 
frightened, though her temper was bold, and only keeping her 
courage to move by feeling now and then as she went for the 
fair face of him at her breast. But the touch of her hand 
made him cry, — it was so cold, — and so even that comfort 
ceased for her, and she could only pray in a dumb unconscious 
way to God to keep the numbness out of her arms lest they 
should drop the boy as she went. 

At a turn in the road there is a crucifix, — a wooden one 
set in the stone. 

She sat down a moment under it, and rested as well as she 
could, and tried to think of God. But the wind would not 
let her. It tore the covering olf her head, and tossed her long 
hair about ; it scourged her with a storm of snapped boughs ; 
it stung her with a shower of shriveled leaves ; it pierced 
through and through her poor thin clothes. She recited her 
paternoster a little as well as she could in the torment of it, 
but it went round and round her in so mad a whirl that she 
could not remember how the words should go. Only she 
remembered to keep the child warm, as a mother-sheep sets 
her body between the lamb and the drifts of the snow. After 
a while he began to cry. 

Do what she would, she could not keep a sense of chilliness 
and discomfort from reaching him ; he wanted the ease and 
rest of some little cozy bed ; her cramped arms held him ill, 
and the old shawl that wrapped him up was wet and cold. 

She murmured little words to him, and tried even to sing 
some scrap of old song ; but her wice failed her, and the child 
was not to be comforted. He cried more, and stirred restlessly. 
With great effort she bent her stiffened knees, and rose, and 
got on her way again. The rocking movement, as she carried 
him and walked on, stilled him a little. 

2 * 


18 


SION A. 


She wished that she had dared to turn up a path higher on 
the mountain that she knew of, which she had passed as the 
Ave Maria bell had rung. But she had not dared. 

She was not sure who was there ; what welcome or what 
curse she might get. He who was sure to be master there 
now had always been fierce with her and stern ; and he might 
be married, and new faces be there too, — she could not tell; 
five years was time enough for so much change. 

She had not dared go up the path ; now that it was miles 
behind her she wished that she had taken it. But it was too 
late now. The town, she knew, must be much the nearer of 
the two, now that she had come down so far; so she went 
onward in the face of the blinding rainstorm. She would go 
up in the morning, she thought, and tell him the truth ; if he 
were brutal to herself, he would not let the child starve ; she 
would go up in the morning, — so she said, and walked onward. 

Her foot had slipped a dozen times, and she had recovered 
her footing and gone on safe. Once again in the dark she 
slipped, her foot slid farther on loose wet earth, a stone gave 
way, she clutched the child with one arm, and flung out the 
other, — she could not see what she caught at in the dark. It 
was a bush of furze. The furze tore her skin, and gave way. 
She slipped farther and farther, faster and faster ; the soil was 
so drenched, and the stones were unloosed. She remembered 
the road enough to know that she was going down, down, 
down, over the edge. She clasped the child with both arms 
once more, and was borne down through the darkness to her 
death. 

She knew nothing more ; the dark night closed in on her ; 
she lost the sound of the ringing bells, and she ceased to feel 
the burden of the child. 


SIGNA. 


I 


19 


CHAPTER HI. 

An hour later, two men came with lanterns into the fields 
that lie between the rough vineyards underneath the road from 
the sea. They had sheep there, which they were going to 
drive into the town in the morning, and they were afraid that 
the flock, terrified in the winds and rains, might have broken 
loose and strayed across the iron rails of the other road that 
runs by the river, and might get crushed under the wheels of 
the night trains running from the west. 

As they went they stumbled against something on the 
ground, and lowered their lights to look. 

There was a broken bramble-bush, and some crushed ferns, 
and a thing that had fallen from the height above on the soak- 
ing soil. By their dim Janterns they saw that the thing was 
a woman, and, bending the light fuller on her as well as they 
could for the rain, they saw that she had been stunned or killed 
by the fall. 

There was a great stone on which the back of her head had 
struck. She lay face upward, with her limbs stretched out ; 
her right arm was close round the body of a living child ; her 
breast was bare. 

The child was breathing and asleep ; he had fallen upon his 
mother, and so had escaped unhurt. 

The men had been born peasants, and they were used to 
wring the throats of trapped birds and to take lambs from 
their mothers with small pity. They lifted the boy with some 
roughness and some trouble from the stilFening arm that in- 
closed him ; he began to wail and moan ; he was very wet and 
miserable, and he said a little word which was a call for his 
mother, like the pipe of a little bird that has fluttered out of 
the nest and lies cold on the grass and frightened. 

One of them took him up, and wrapped his cloak across the 
little sobbing mouth. 

The other knelt down, and tried to make his light burn 
better, and laid his hand on the woman’s breast to feel for a 
pulse of life. But she was quite dead. He did what he could 


20 


I 


SIGNA. 


to call back life, but it was all in vain ; at length he covered 
her breast, and stared up at his fellow. 

“ This looks like Pippa,” he said, slowly, with a sound aa 
of awe in his voice. 

The other lowered his light too and looked. 

“Yes, it is like Pippa,” he said, slowly, also. 

Then they were both silent for some moments, the lantern 
light blinking in the rain. 

“ Yes, it is Pippa ; yes, certainly it is Pippa,” said the first 
one, stupidly ; and he ran his hand with a sort of shudder 
over the outline of her features and her form. 

The one who held the child turned his light on the little 
wet face ; the baby ceased to cry, and opened his big, dark, 
wondering eyes at the fiame. 

“ And whose byblow is this?” said he. 

“ The devil knows,” said he who knelt by the mother. 
“ But it is Pippa. Look here on her left breast — do you see ? 
there is the little three-cornered scar of the wound I gave her 
with my knife at the wine fair that day.” 

The other looked closer while the rain beat on the white 
cold chest of the woman. 

“ Yes, it must be Pippa.” 

Then they were both silent again a little, for they were 
Pippa’s brothers. 

“ Let us go and tell them in the Lastra, and get the bier,” 
said the one who knelt by her, getting up on to his feet, with 
a sullen dazed gloom on his dark face. 

“And leave her here?” said the one who had the child. 

“ Why not? nobody will run away with the dead !” 

“ But this little beast — what can one do with him ?” 

“ Carry him to your wife.” 

“ There are too many at home.” 

“ She has one of his age ; she can take him.” 

“ She will never touch Pippa’s boy.” 

“ Give him to me, then, and stay you here.” 

“No, that I dare not: the foul fiend mi^ht come after 
her.” 

“ The foul fiend take your terrors. Let us get into the Las- 
tra; we can see then. We must tell the Misericordia, and 
get the bier ” 

“ There is no such haste ; she is stone dead. What a pipe 


SIGNA. 


21 


this brat has ! One would think it was a lamb with the knife 
in its throat.” 

“ It is very cold. Who would have thought it could have 
lived — such a fall as that, and such a night !” 

“ It lives because nobody wants it. She had no gold about 
her, had she ?” 

“ I do not know.” 

The one who held the child stooped over the dead woman 
awhile, then rose with a sigh of regret : 

“ Not a stiver ; I have felt her all over.” 

“ Then she must have done ill these five years.” 

“ Yes, — and yet so handsome, too. But Pippa never plaited 
even.” 

“Nay, never, — poor Pippa!” 

So they muttered, plodding over the broken heavy ground, 
with the sound of the swollen river in their ears and their lan- 
tern lights gleaming through the steam of the rain. In the 
noise of the waters the child sobbed and screamed unheard. 
The man had tossed him over his shoulder as he carried the 
new-born lambs, only with a little less care. 

They clambered up into the road and tramped through the 
slough of mud into the town. The woman had drawn nigh 
to the upper town by a dozen yards, when her foot had slipped 
and she had reeled over to her death. But the feet of the 
shepherds were bare, and kept sure hold, like the feet of goats. 
They tramped on, quick, through the crooked streets and over 
the bridge ; the river had run high, and along the banks and 
on the flat roofs of the towers there were the lights burning 
of the men who watched for the flood. They heard how loud 
and swiftly the river was running as they went over the bridge 
and down into the irregular twisting street and under the old 
noble walls of the lower village of the Lastra. 

The one who carried the child opened a rickety door in the 
side of a tumble-down house, and climbed a steep stairway, 
and pushed his way into a room where children of all ages, 
and trusses of straw, and a pig, and a hen with her chickens, 
and a black crucifix, and a load of cabbage-leaves and maize- 
stalks, and a single lemon-tree in a pot, were all together 
nearly indistinguishable in darkness. 

He tossed the child to a sturdy brown woman with fierce 
brows. 


22 


SIGNA. 


“ Here, Nita, here is a young one I found in the fields. 
Feed it to-night, and to-morrow I will tell the priest and the 
others, and we shall get credit. It is near dead of cold already. 
No — I cannot stay — do you hear how the waters are out? 
Bruno is down below, wanting me to help house the sheep.” 

He clattered away down the stairs, and joined his brother 
in the street. 

“ I told her nothing of Pippa,” he said, in a whisper. “ If 
she knew it were Pippa’s, not a drop of milk would he get to- 
night. As it is, it is a pretty little beggar ; she will let him 
share with Toto. She knows charity pleases Heaven and the 
Padre. And — and — see here, Bruno, why need we speak of 
Pippa at all ?” 

His brother stared at him in the murky gloom. 

“ Why ? — why, we must fetch her in and bury her.” 

“ The waters will do that before morning if we let them 
alone ; that will spare us a deal of trouble, Bruno.” 

“ Trouble — why?” 

“ Oh, it is always trouble — the church, and the law, and all 
the rest. Then, you know, the Padre is such a man to ask 
questions. And nobody saw her but ourselves. And they 
may say we tumbled her over. She has come back poor, and 
all Signa knows that you struck at her with your knile on the 
day of the fair, and that she has been a disgrace and a weari- 
ness always. We might have trouble, Bruno.” 

“ But the child ?” 

“ Oh, the child ! I have told Nita we picked it up lost in 
the fields. Why should we tell anybody to-night about Pippa ? 
The poor soul is dead. No worse can come. Men do not hurt 
dead women. And there is so much to do to-night, Bruno. 
We should see for the sheep on the other side now, and then 
stay down here. The devil knows what pranks Arno may not 
play to-night. In five hours, I warrant you, he will be out all 
over the country.” 

“ But to leave her there — all alone — it is horrible !” 

“ How shall we show we did not push her there to her 
death ?” 

“ But we did not” 

“ That is why they would all say we did. Everybody knows 
there was bad blood with us and Pippa ; and most of all with 
you. Let the night go over, Bruno. We want the night to 


SIGNA. 


23 


work in, and if she be there at day-dawn, then we can tell. It 
will be time enough.” 

“ Well — lie as you like,” said the other, sullenly. “ Let us 
get the sheep in, anyhow.” 

So they went out to the open country again, through the 
storm of the west wind that was blowing the river back from 
the sea, so that it could not get out, and was driven up again 
between the hills, and so overflowed the lands through which 
it traveled. The men worked hard and in earnest housing 
their own sheep and driving their neighbors’ cattle on rising 
knolls, or within church-doors, or anywhere where they were 
safe from the water ; and then came down again into the street 
towards midnight, where all the people were awake and astir, 
watching Arno, and holding themselves ready to flee. 

“ You have got the ague, Bruno,” said the man at the wine- 
shop, for his arm shook as he drank a draught. 

“ So would you if you had been up to your middle in water 
all the night like me,” said the elder brother, roughly. But 
it was not the water : they were too used to that. It was the 
thought of the woman dead all alone under the old sea road. 

The night was a bitter black night. 

Up the valley the river was out, flooding the pastures far 
and near. Boats went and came, taking help, and bringing 
homeless families. Watchflres were burning everywhere. 
Bodies of drowned cattle drifted in by scores. There were 
stories that the great city herself was in flood. In such a time 
every breath is a tale of terror, and every rumor grows in- 
stantly to giant proportions. 

The upper town of Signa itself was safe. But there was 
great peril for the low-lying Lastra. No one went to their 
beds. The priest prayed. The bells tolled. The men went 
to and fro in fear. The horrid loudness of the roaring waters 
drowned all other sounds. 

When the morning broke, sullen and gray, and still beaten 
with storm, the cold dull waste of water stretched drearily on 
either side of the great bridge. The two brethren went with 
the crowd that looked from it eastward and westward. 

The river had spread over the iron rails, and the grassy, 
broken ground, and the bushes of furze, and reached half-way 
up to the rocks and the hill-road above. The wind had changed, 
and was blowing in from the eastward mountains. The water 


24 


SIGNA, 


rolled under its force with furious haste to the sea, like a thing 
long imprisoned, and frantic with the joy of escape. 

“ It has taken Pippa,” said the brothers, low to one another. 

And they felt like men who have murdered a woman. 

Not that it mattered, of course. She was dead. And if 
not to the sea, then to the earth, all the dead must go, — into 
darkness, and forgotten of all. 


CHAPTER IV. 

The brothers looked pale under their brown skins in the 
ashen light of the dawn. 

But they had lost sheep, like other folks, and so, like other 
folks, were pitied as they went hack into the Lastra to get a 
mouthful of bread after the sickly vigil of the night. 

Bruno was an unwedded man, and could bear misfortune ; 
but Lippo was a man early married, and having six young 
children to clamor round his soup-pot and fight for the crusts 
of bread. He was pointed out among the crowd of sufferers, 
and was one of those who were pitied the most, and who was 
sure to get a good portion of the alms-giving 'and public relief. 

“ Give Bruno a cup of wine and a crust, Nita,” said he, 
going up the stairs into the house of his wife. He lived there 
with her because her father, who was a cobbler, owned the 
place, and he himself best liked the life of the Lastra. The 
wife too, having been a cobbler’s daughter and grand-daughter, 
had been always used to see life from the half-door of the work- 
shop ; she would not become a mere contadina, hoeing and 
weeding and plaiting and carrying dung in a broad-leaved hat 
and a russet gown, — not she, were it ever so ; and Anita was 
one of those strong and fortunate women who always get 
their own way by dint of their power to make every one 
wretched who crosses them. 

“ Leave me to speak,” said Lippo, with a glance of mean- 
ing to his brother. 

It was five in the morning, very cold, and still dusky. Anx- 
iety was allayed, since the wind blew from the east, and the 
waters were sinking, though slowly. 


SIGNA. 


25 


Nita, who had been up all night on the watch, like the rest 
of the women, was boiling cofi’ee in a tin pot, and fanning the 
charcoal. The children lay about as they chose on the floor. 
None of them had been put to bed, since at any moment they 
might have had to run for their lives. 

Bruno looked round for Pippa’s child. He did not see it. 

“ An awful night,” said Lippo, kicking the pig out of a 
doze. “ They do say the Vecchio bridge is down in Florence, 
and that the jewelers could not get out in time. I wish the 
gold and silver stones would drift down here. All the 
Gr^ve country is swamped. St. Giosto sticks up on his tower 
like a masthead. The cattle are drowned by herds. Whole 
stacks of wheat are against the piles, making hungry souls’ 
mouths water ; rotted and ruined ; fine last year’s grain ; the 
good God is bitter hard sometimes. Where is the baby I 
brought you last night, my woman?” 

Nita pointed with her charcoal fan ; her cofiee was on the 
point of boiling. 

The brothers looked where she pointed, to a nest of hay 
close to the hen and her chickens. The child lay there sound 
asleep, with his little naked limbs curled up ; and close against 
him was Toto, a yearling child also. 

The elder brother turned away suddenly, and his body shook 
a little. 

“ You have never dried your clothes, Bruno,” said his sister- 
in-law. “ What a gaby a man is without a wife ! Drink that : 
it is hot as hot. And what did you bring me that baby for — 
you and Lippo? You know whose brat it is, I suppose, and 
look out for the reward ? I thought so, or I would not have 
given it house-room. Toto is more work than enough, so 
masterful as he is — and so ravenous.” 

“ Nay,” said Lippo, as with a sheepish apology for his weak- 
ness, “ I know nothing of whose brat it is. I was just sorry 
for it, left in the soaking fields there ; and I picked it up as I 
should pick up a lame lamb. What do you think of it, my 
dearest ? does it look like a poor child or a rich one, eh ? 
Women are quick to judge.” 

The black brows of Nita lowered in wrath. 

“ Mercy of heaven ! Who would have to do with such dolts 
as men ? Just because the child was there you pick it up, 
never thinking of all the hungry mouths half fed at home I 
B 3 


26 


SIGNA. 


Shame on you ! You are an unnatural brute. You would 
starve your own to nourish a stranger !” 

“Nay, sweetest Nita,” murmured Lippo, coaxingly, “on 
such a night — and a child taken down by flood, too — not a 
living soul but would have done as I did. And who knows 
but he may be some rich father’s child, and make our fortunes ? 
Anyway, the township will give us credit, and he can go to 
the Innocenti to-morrow, if we find no gain in him. Look 
what his things betoken.” 

“ Oh, his things are rough-spun enough, and vile as can be,” 
said his wife, in a fuming fury. “ And would a rich man’s 
child be out on flood ? It is only the poor brats weather finds 
loose for it to play antics with. The child is a beggar’s son, 
and this thing linked round his neck by a little string is a 
thing you get at the fairs for a copper bit.” 

The two men looked together at the locket that she held to 
them ; it was of base metal, — a little poor round trumpery 
plaything. On it there was the one word, in raised letters, 
of “ Signa,” and inside a curl of soft light hair. That was all. 
They could none of them read, so the letters on the metal told 
them nothing. They stooped together over the sleeping child. 

He was pretty and well made ; he lay quite naked in the 
hay, and beside brown Toto looked like one of the little white 
marble children of old Mino. His lashes and his brows were 
black, but over his forehead hung little rings of soft, fair, 
crumpled hair. 

Bruno turned away. 

“ She used to look just like that when she was a little child,” 
he muttered to himself. 

Lippo glanced round to see if his wife heard. But she was 
busy with the hen, who had got into a barrel of rice, and was 
eating treble her own price in the market at one meal. 

“ The brat must go,” said she, turning and flogging the hen 
away. “ As for a chance that it is a rich man’s child, that is 
all rubbish. You make your bread with next year’s corn. 
Chances like that are old wives’ tales. What we have to do 
is to feed six hungry stomachs. You were a fool to bring it 
here at all. But to dream one should keep it ! Holy Mary!” 

“ Holy Mary would say, keep it,” said Bruno, munching 
his crust. 

“ Maybe it is your own, Bruno. Those that hide can find,’ 


SIGNA. 


27 


said his sister-in-law, sharply. “ The child shall pack to-day. 
I shall go and tell them at the guard-house. Toto is more 
than enough ; and as for that locket, you can get such trash 
as that at any fair for a couple of figs. That goes for noth- 
ing-” 

“ Well, well, keep the poor baby till noon, and I will see 
what the curate says. It is always well to see what he says,” 
her husband answered her, hurriedly, and afraid of the gather- 
ing storm on Bruno’s face. 

Bruno was passionate, tempestuous, and weak, and the 
quieter and subtler brother ruled him with ease whilst seeming 
to obey. But for turning the baby of dead Pippa’s to public 
maintenance, Lippo had a foreboding in him that in this mat- 
ter his brother would be too strong for him. 

He hurried away out of pretext of the labor awaiting them 
in the inundated country, not without misgiving that the dark- 
est suspicions as to the fatherhood of the foundling were 
awakening in the jealous soul of his wife. 

They went straight to the edge of the river, and got out 
their old black boat, with its carved prow and tricolored tiller, 
and pulled down the current of the now quiet water, to see 
with the rest what they could help to save from the flotsam 
and jetsam of the flood. Whole districts lay under water, and 
the river was full of dead cats and dogs, drowned sheep, float- 
ing pipkins and wine-casks, bales of hay, carcasses of cows, 
and broken bits of furniture from many a ruined farmstead 
and peasant’s hut laid low. 

“ Listen,” said the elder brother, suddenly, when the boat 
was fairly out from the bank, and with his hooked pole he 
drew in a spinning-wheel with its hank of flax drenched like 
a drowned girl’s hair. “ Listen to me, Lippo. Pippa’s son 
must not go to charity. Do you hear ?” 

“I hear. But we are poor men, and Pippa was ” 

“ That is neither here nor there,” said Bruno, with his dark 
brows meeting. “ She never asked alms of us, nor house- 
room, nor did anything except go to her death just as sheep 
tumble over a rock. The baby must not go to the parish. 
We did faulty enough, — letting her go down flood with never 
an ofiice of church said over her. And — who knows ? — who 
knows ? — she might not be quite dead, after all.” 

“ Nita will not keep him, that is sure,” said the younger, 


28 


SIGNA. 


quickly. “Look! that is Barcelli’s old red cow. You may 
know hex by the spot on the side.” 

“ Would she keep him if she were paid?” 

Lippo’s eyes lighted with joy, but he bent a grave face over 
his pole as he raked in a floating oil -flask by its wicker coat. 

“ I doubt she would not. She has a deal of trouble with 
Toto. And who is there to pay, pray ? We know no more 
than the cow there who the man was : you know that.” 

“ I will pay.” 

“ You 1” 

“ Yes ; I will pay the child’s keep.” 

“ Holy angels I And you who were forever at words and 
blows with Pippa, and stabbed at her even for being too gay I” 

“ I will pay,” said Bruno. 

Lippo rowed on in silence some moments. 

“ How much ?” he asked, at last. 

“ I will give you half of all I get.” 

Lippo’s white teeth showed themselves in a sudden smile. 
His brother gained a good deal in corn and oil and beans and 
hay and wine, being on good land, and being a man who 
worked and got the uttermost out of the soil that he shared 
with his master, and Lippo was often pinched by his father- 
in-law Baldo the cobbler, and half famished by his wife, and 
was a true, thrifty son of the soil, and knew the worth of a 
hundredth part of a copper coin as well as any man between 
sea and mountain. 

“ Half of all you get, and we to keep the child,” he said, 
absently, and as with reluctance. “ But what can we say to 
Nita?” 

“ You are never at a loss for good lying, Lippo.” 

Lippo smiled ; his vanity was flattered. 

“ I never lie to Nita. She always finds one out. Only in 
the matter of Pippa’s son I hid the truth to please you. She 
never would nurse the child if she guessed. But as for making 
her keep him, say what one will, it will be impossible, — im- 
possible, my dear.” 

“ It must be,” said Bruno, withdrawing his hand from the 
tiller and bringing it down with violence on the boat’s side, 
while his eyes flashed with blue fire as the lightning flashes 
most summer nights over the blue hills of his own Signa. “ It 
must be. I will pay. I will give you half I get. Good har- 


SIGNA. 


29 


vests, — you know what that is. But Pippa’s child shall not 
go to the parish while I have an arm to drive a plow through 
the ground or to guide over the field. Settle it with your wife 
your own way. But Pippa’s child shall grow up among us.” 

“ Dear Bruno, to please you I will try,” said gentle Lippo, 
with a sigh. “ But we have brats too many in the house, and 
you know what Nita’s ‘ Nay’ can be.” 

“ Nay or yea, the child stays,” said Bruno. 

“ The half of everything,” murmured Lippo, as he bent to 
his oars and passed by a dog howling on the top of his floating 
kennel to reach his pole to a butcher’s basket of meat that 
was tossing among the rubbish. 

But Bruno, having the tiller, pushed first to reach the dog. 

“ It is only a cur,” said Lippo. 

Bruno pulled the dog into the boat. 

In the Lastra, and in the town, and in all the country round 
or near Signa, the brothers were known as well as the mass-bells 
of the churches. 

The Signa people thought that Bruno the contadino was a 
bad man enough, ready with his knife and often in a brawl, 
and too often seen at fairs and with other men’s wives on feast- 
days. Lippo they liked and respected, and everybody spoke 
him fair ; and he would keep the peace most beautifully when 
men got angry in the street before his house-door. 

They were both handsome men, and could neither of them 
read, and believed in their priest and their paternoster, and 
had never been beyond the mountains around Signa, except 
now and then — Bruno with his bullocks, and Lippo in a 
barroccino to buy leather — down the Yaldarno into .the Lily 
City. 

Bruno lived on the wild hill-side, among the thyme and the 
myrtle and the gorse and the grass -cropping sheep and the 
ever-singing nightingales. Lippo dwelt down in the street, 
doing as little as he could, and by preference nothing, in the 
smell of his wife’s frying and in the sound of her father’s little 
hammer ; rowing out his boat when there was any chance for 
it to pay, and seeing after the few sheep that the shoemaker 
kept above the bridge. They had been born within a year of 
each other, — sons of peasants and workers in the fields. 
Bruno had stayed on the old land where his fathers had had 
rights of the soil uncounted generations. Lippo had loitered 


30 


SIONA. 


down love-making into the Lastra, and had married very early 
the daughter of well-to-do old Baldo. 

There had been several sons after them. Two had been 
killed as soldiers, and others had died in infancy by various 
strokes of evil chance ; and the youngest of them all had been 
Pippa, — Pippa, whose body was gone out on the flood to the 
sea with never a prayer said over her. Beautiful, flerce, way- 
ward, willful, fire-mouthed Pippa, who had run over the hills 
like a lizard, and who had had saucy words on her tongue as 
a rose has its thorns, and who had had all Signa gazing after 
her for her beauty when she walked singing like a cherub in 
the wake of the banners of the church. 

Not that she had ever cared much for the church, — poor 
Pippa ! 

She had always been quarrelsome and self-willed and head- 
strong, and had flouted her lovers, and been petulant to her 
own hindrance, and as wild as a hawk, and provoking — yes, 
provoking — past the endurance of any man who was a brother 
and nothing more. She would never sit quiet and spin ; she 
would never keep her eyes on her tress of straw as other girls 
did ; if she milked the cow she would upset the pail just out 
of wantonness, and would laugh and dance to see their rage 
when she let the pigs run in among her brothers’ plot of green 
peas. Yes, certainly, she was provoking; a bad girl, even 
though loving at heart ; no one was to blame that she had 
gone away without a word, and come back so, with a child at 
her breast, to find her death the night of the flood. 

A self-willed foolish girl, and with wrong-doing ingrained in 
her. As for patience, who could be very patient with a woman 
that let the pigs in among your peas just when green peas 
fetched their weight in silver ? And then she had such a 
tongue, too, the little shrew : true, she did not bear malice, 
and would not growl, growl, growl, for hours together, as Nita 
would, and Nita’s mother, thinking it the only way to manage 
men ; true, she was a generous soul, and would let a beggar 
have her dinner, though meals were meagre on the hills; and 
when one had beaten her till she was blue she would not tell, but 
say she had fallen from the ladder trimming the vines, or that 
the bees had stung her. Still, a willful, quarrelsome, pettish 
thing : no man could be blamed for her ill hap nor for her end. 

So Lippo said to himself, when his brother had gone up to 


SIGNA, 


31 


tlie hills, and he himself left his boat, to go down the narrow 
street homeward, pondering on Pippa’s child and on what he 
should say to Anita. 

As he went up the stairs he settled the lie to his mind’s con- 
tent, and entered the room looking with his fairest faith out 
of his clear brown eyes. 

“ I am going to be frank with you, Nita,” he said, and then 
he sat down and lied so prettily, that if there be a Father of 
Lies he must quite have rejoiced to hear him. 

Nita listened as well as a woman can listen, — that is, inter- 
rupting twenty times and getting up to do some irrelevant 
thing twice twenty. 

“ Bruno’s son !” she cried, at last. 

Hush ! The children will hear,” said Lippo. “ It is as I 
tell you. Only Bruno must not know that you know, because 
he is so afraid that red-haired Boma whom he is courting 
should hear of it. But you see why I closed with him, Nita. 
It will be a good thing for us. We can eat like fatting pigs 
off Bruno’s land. Nothing to prevent us. Though it is only 
hill land, I know, still his share comes to a good bit, taking 
fair weather and foul. And then, besides that, we shall have 
credit in the Lastra, for Bruno never will say a word, and the 
curato and all the place may as well think the child a found- 
ling as not. A good deed smells sweet in the neighbors’ nos- 
trils, and a good name is like a blest palm. We must tell your 
father, or he will grumble at there being a seventh mouth. But 
nobody else need know. The brat will grow up with the others, 
and we shall seem kind : that is all.” 

“ To think of its being Bruno’s !” cried Nita, with a clap 
of her big brown hands. “ Did I not say so, now ? Did I not 
jeer him as he looked at it asleep ? Oh-ho I Who can deceive 
me ? Never you try, Lippo, more !” 

“ You can see through a millstone,” replied Lippo, with an 
embrace of her. “ Only an ass can ever seek to blind you ; and 
that is why I told you the truth, though Bruno would have 
screened it. He is so afraid of the creature he goes to now 
ever knowing, — you understand.” 

“ The child will be a bother,” said Anita, remembering the 
kicks and cuffs with whose best administration she could scarce 
manage to keep the peace among her brood or their hands ever 
out of the soup-pot. 


32 


SIONA. 


“ Oh, no,” said Lippo, shrugging his shoulders : where 
there are six there may as well be seven. He will tumble up 
with the others. We are to have half of all Bruno gets; and 
I can guess to a stalk, you know, what an acre of wheat is 
worth or what an olive or a fig tree bears. No bailiff would 
outwit me. I was not bred out on the fields for nothing. Half 
of everything, you know, Nita. That will mean a good deal in 
good seasons. I am very hungry, carina. Could you not fry 
something in oil, nice and tempting, for one ? An artichoke, 
now, or a blackbird?” 

Nita grumbled at the extravagance, but, being in a good 
humor, went down-stairs and across the way and brought over 
some artichokes and fried them and ate them with her husband, 
the children being sent to make dust pies and castles in the 
sun on the stones below, old Baldo keeping an eye on them 
over his half-door. 

Lippo and his wife ate their artichokes, and drank a little 
wine with them. 

Pippa’s son cried unnoticed in his nest of hay, and sobbed 
out his one little word for mother, which was like the moan of 
a little unfledged bird left in the snow. 

“We will bring him up to help himself/’ said Lippo, with 
his mouth filled with the fried eggs and oil. 

The child sobbed on, and felt for his mother’s breast, and 
only had his small soft rosy hands torn with the thorns and 
pricked with the burs and briers of the sun-dried hay. 


CHAPTER y. 

Meanwhile, Bruno went on up the hills ; up the same old 
road which had felt Pippa’s footsteps on it the night before ; 
with the river underneath it, and on the other side the moun- 
tains rising, with the olives and vines about their sides, and 
on their summits old watch-towers and fortresses, and dusky 
woods of ilex, and cloudy masses of stone-pine, that sent their 
sweet strong odor down the valley a score of miles. 

Bruno went on his way, looking neither right nor left. He 


SIGNA. 


33 


went over the ground so often, and he had seen it all from the 
year he was horn ; always this, and never anything else, and 
long familiarity dulls the sense of beauty, even where such 
sense has been awakened ; and Bruno’s never had been, — ex- 
cept for a woman’s looks. 

He strode on, not looking up nor looking back ; a straight- 
limbed, swarthy, fine-built peasant, of thirty years or more, 
with the oval face of his country, and broad, black, luminous 
eyes, soft and contemplative, like the eyes of the ox, when the 
rage was not alight in them. 

He did not look round, because peasants do not look up 
from the soil ; and he did not look back, because he had no 
care to see the spot where he had kneeled down in the wet 
grass by the broken bushes, with the noise of the river in his 
ears. 

He went up the sea-road some way, and then quitted it and 
struck to the left. The soil to which he belonged was on the 
side of a great bold hill, that turned to Signa and faced straight 
down the valley, and whose wine is named in the Bacco in 
Toscana of Bedi. There are beautiful hills in this country, 
steep and bold, and chiefly of limestone and granite, covered 
all over with gumcistus and thyme and wild roses and myrtle, 
with low-growing laurels and tall cypresses, and boulders of 
stone, and old thorn-trees, and flocks of nightingales always, 
and the sad- voiced little gray owl that was beloved of Shelley. 

Bruno’s farmstead was on one of these hills ; half the hill 
was cultured, and the other half was wild ; and on its height 
was an old gray, mighty place, once the palace of a cardinal, 
and where there now dwelt the steward of the estate on which 
Bruno had been born. 

His cottage was a large, low, white building, with a red roof, 
and a great arched door, and a sun-dial on the wall, and a 
group of cypresses beside, and a big walnut-tree before it. 
There was an old well with some broken sculpture ; some fowls 
scratching under the fig-boughs ; a pig hunting for roots in 
the black bare earth ; behind it stretched the wild hill- side, 
and in front a great slope of fields and vineyards; and far 
below them in the distance the valley and the river and the 
bridge, with the high crest of the upper Signa, and the low- 
lying wall towers of the Lastra on either side of the angry 
waters. 

B* 


34 


SION A. 


Bruno did not look back at it all. He saw the sun rise 
over it, and the beautiful pale light steal up, and up, and up, 
and up, whenever he arose to his work in the day-dawn. But 
it was nothing at all to him. When now and then a traveler 
or a painter strayed thither, and said it was beautiful, Bruno 
smiled, glad because it was his own country : that was all. 

He went into his cold, quiet, desolate house, and sat down for 
a minute’s rest : he was tired. 

There was no one to greet him. He did everything for him- 
self. He had no neighbors. The nearest contadino lived a 
mile down beyond the fields which in summer were a sea of 
maize and a starry world of fire-flies ; and the old palace was 
some distance higher on the crest, where the gorse grew thick- 
est, and the mountain-moss clustered about the roots of the 
stone pines. 

Here — in the long, low, rambling dwelling, with the sun- 
dial on its wall, and the great archways underneath it, and the 
stacks of straw before it — there had been nine of them once. 
Now Bruno lived there alone. 

He sat down a minute on the settle, and thought. Think- 
ing was new work to him. He never thought at all, except 
of the worm in the ripening wheat, or the ticks in the flock’s 
fleeces. The priest did his thinking for him. What use was 
it to pay a priest for having opinions, if one had to think for 
one’s self as well ? 

But he sat and thought now. 

Poor Pippa ! what a little, ruddy, pretty thing she was 
lying in her white swaddling bands, when he was a big, rough 
boy twelve years old, with bare feet and chest, who used to 
come in from the fields hungry and footsore, and feel angry to 
see the last-come child at his mother’s breast, getting all her 
care and caresses. 

He bore Pippa a grudge for her birth. They were all 
boys, rough-and-tumble together, share and share alike ; and 
then one summer morning the girl came, and their mother 
never seemed the same to them again, — never any more. The 
little girl, with a face like a bud of the red-rose laurel, seemed 
to be all she thought about, — or so they fancied ; and anything 
good that could be got, honey, or a drop of new milk, or a lit- 
tle white loaf from the town, or an apricot from the fattoria, 
was always set aside for Pippa, — pretty, saucy, noisy, idle 


SIGNA. 


35 


Pippa, who was more often in mischief than they were, but 
never got as they did a thrashing and a wish that the devil 
might come* and fetch away all naughty children. 

There had been times when he had hated Pippa, hated her 
from the first day he saw her lying on her mother’s bosom, 
with her little red mouth clinging as a bee does at a fiower, to 
the night when he had scolded her for dancing with any fool 
that asked her, and then she had mocked him about a dead 
love, and he had struck at her with his knife, and the people 
had dragged him off her ; he all blind with rage and shame 
at his own misdoing ; and the blood had spouted out up from 
her neck, and stained the lace she wore as red as a goldfinch’s 
feathers. 

He had hated her always. 

It seemed to him now that he had been like a brute to her, 
— poor, pretty, brown-eyed, happy, self-willed thing, who had 
been spoiled from her babyhood upward. 

Lippo remembered how provoking she had been, and justi- 
fied himself, as he went home through the Lastra. 

But Bruno forgot it, and only reproached himself. He had 
always been rough and fierce and moody with her, — oh, 
yes, no doubt. If he had been patient with her, — he 
twelve years older, too, — she might never have run away from 
her home on the hill, and borne that nameless child, and gone 
to her death on the old sea-road. 

No doubt he had done wrong by her, — had been too severe 
and tyrannical, and had helped to make the cottage distasteful 
to her after their mother had died and he had become master, 
and had tried to shut her in as a thrush is shut in a wicker 
cage. 

He forgot all her faults, — ^poor dead Pippa, — and he re- 
membered all his own. Liberal natures will err thus to them- 
selves ; and Bruno, with all his evil ways, was as liberal as 
the sun and winds. 

Poor Pippa ! 

He saw her as he had seen her standing out in the light on 
the hill, with her little brown hands plaiting the straw all un- 
evenly, and her bow-like mouth gay with laughter at some 
piece of mischief sweet to her as a fig in summer. She had 
used to look so pretty, with her arch eyes shining under her 
great straw pent-house of a hat, and her supple, slim shape, in 


36 


SIGNA. 


brown and red, like a fire-fly standing up as a poppy does 
against the corn on the amber light of the evening sky, here 
where the hill was just the same, and only she was a thing 
that was gone for ever and ever and ever. 

Bruno shut his eyes not to see the hill. But he could not 
shut out his thoughts. He had been a brute to her. It 
stirred and grew in him, this mute remorse, which Lippo 
would have laughed at, and which had been awakened ever 
since he had gone about his business as the river rose, and left 
the dead woman alone to drift down with the flood. 

She was dead, of course, and it could hurt her no more to be 
swept out to the salt sea-pools westward than to be lowered 
into the earth in a cofiin. Still, Bruno, if he had gone straight 
to the priest and told him, and had let the church sorrow over 
and bury her, would not have been tormented by the thought 
of her as he was now. Now, in a curious kind of half-stupid 
way, he felt as if he had found her and had killed her. 

There had been war between him and Pippa always ; and 
though it had shocked him a little to find her lying there life- 
less in the dark, yet he had not cared much at first. But 
since he had forsaken her to the will of the waters in the 
vague fear of that nameless trouble which his brother had 
threatened him with as possible, Bruno — a brave man all his 
days — felt a coward ; and with the tingling shame of that new 
craven sense came a self-reproach in which every rough word 
and fierce act of his life against the lost creature rose in 
judgment agaipst him. 

Poor Pippa ! 

After all, what had her faults been ? Only mirth and over- 
eagerness for pleasure, and a quick tongue, and a love of the 
sunshine idly spent among fruits and flowers whilst others 
were working. These were all. 

She had been truthful and generous of temper, and never 
unwilling to forgive. Nay, though he had struck at her with 
his open blade that fair night, she had called out to the peo- 
ple not to hurt him for it ; and when she had left the hill-side 
that very summer, — no one knew for whither nor with whom, — 
did she not say to an old woman, who alone saw her going through 
the millet at break of day with a bundle, “ Tell my brothers 
I am not angry any more: they have been unkind to me, but I 
have been troublesome, and said hot words very often ; and ] 


SIGNA. 


37 


will pray for them, if that will do any good : only tell them 
not to try to bring me back, because we never are at peace 
together ” ? 

Poor Pippa ! 

He shut his eyes against the sunlight ; but, shut them as 
he would with both hands, he saw her as he had seen her last 
coming through the bean-flowers, with the long evening 
shadows and the little golden fire-flies seeming to run before 
her ; when he had turned across the fields and avoided her 
because of the thrust with the knife, which he had never 
spoken of, and of which he was half ashamed and half defiant, 
and which therefore he would never admit that he regretted, 
but lived on in silence with her under the same roof, trusting 
to chance. 

And chance came, — the chance that one summer morning 
the bed of Pippa was empty, and old Viola, coming in with a 
sheaf of green cane for her donkey, told them how she had 
met the girl, and of her farewell words. 

Shut his eyes as he would, he saw her so ; among the purple 
bean-flowers that night when his heart had swelled a little at 
sight of her, and he had been half inclined to tell her he was 
sorry for that blow, and then had felt the pride rise in him, 
and had said to himself that the girl had deserved it, — dis- 
obeying him, and then jesting at him, — and so had struck 
across the rustling corn, and let her go without a word. 

And now she was dead, — gone out on the flood to the sea ; 
and he had never told her that he had been sorry for the stab, 
and never could tell her now. 

Would God tell her ? or any one of the saints ? 

Bruno wondered. He felt as if that dead woman whom 
the river had got stood forever between him and all the hosts 
of heaven. 

He was a strong man, and his emotions and his intelligence 
were both unawakened, and his life was much like that of his 
own plow bullocks ; but he shuddered through all his limbs 
as he rose up from the wooden settle and faced the day. Work 
with the laborer is an instinct, as watching is the house-dog’s ; 
and pain may stifle it for a moment, but no more. 

He went out and unloosed the bar of the stable-doors, and 
brought out his oxen, and muzzled them, and yoked them 
together, and drove them out over the steep, slanting fields that 

4 


38 


SIONA. 


ran upward and downward, and were intersected by lines of 
maples and mulberries with the leafless vines clinging to them, 
and by watercourses cut deep that the rain might be borne 
down the mountain-side, and by wild hedges of briony and 
rose and arbutus unido, with here and there winter-red leaves 
of creepers that the winds had forgotten to blow away. 

It was a gray morning, with heavy white mists lying over 
all the valley down below ; and on the high hills it was very 
cold. Bruno drove his meek large-eyed beasts through the 
black earth with a heavy heart. 

He seemed always to see Pippa as she had used to come, 
when their father lived, and she was a child, with a black loaf 
and a flask of wine, out to them on the hill in the plowing- 
time, and stroked the bullocks, and put round their leathern 
frontlets gay wreaths of anemones, purple and red /and blue, 
and the berries of the beautiful carbezzulo. 

And now she was dead, — stone dead, — like the mouse the 
share killed in the furrow. 

The bullocks, well used to goad and curse, turned their 
broad foreheads and looked at him with luminous fond eyes : 
he was so gentle with them ; they were grateful, but they won- 
dered why. 

Bruno plowed all day, and the wind blew up from the sea, 
and he felt as if it were blowing her long wet hair against 
him. 

“ I will do good by the child, so help me , and perhaps 

they will tell her in heaven,” he said to himself, as he went to 
and fro up and down the shelving fields underneath the lines 
of the leafless trees. 

“ Perhaps they will tell her in heaven ?” he thought, as he 
went over the heavy wet clods in the mist. 


SJGNA. 


39 


\ 


CHAPTER VI. 

Brunone Marcillo, always known as Bruno, was what 
all his people had always been for seven hundred centuries and 
more. 

They had been vassals and spearmen in the old warlike 
times, and well-to-do contadini ever afterwards ; giving their 
sons, when need arose, to die in the common cause of the 
native soil, but otherwise never stirring olF their own hillside ; 
good husbandmen, bold men, fierce haters, honest neighbors, 
keeping their womenkind strictly, and letting their males have 
as much license as was compatible with unremitting and patient 
labor in all seasons. 

They were a race remarkable for physical beauty, — a beauty 
that is strictly national ; the dark straight-browed classic 
beauty which Cimabue has put in his Garden of Olives, and 
Signorelli given to his noble Prophets. 

They had always intermarried with mountain races like 
their own, or taken wives from the Lastra households, where 
the ancient blood ran pure. The father of Brunone and Lippo 
had done otherwise ; he had taken a work-girl of the city, a 
pretty feckless thing, whom he had seen one market night that 
he had strayed into the Loggia theatre, when a good harvest 
had put too much loose cash in his pockets, and the humors, 
of Cimarosa’s Nemeci Generosi had been making him laugh 
till he cried. 

The girl had become to him a good wife enough, nobody had 
denied that ; but she was not of the stern stuff that the Mar- 
cillo housewives always had been, with their busts of Ceres 
and their brows of Juno, their arms that could guide the oxen 
and their heads that could balance a wine-barrel. 

She was timid, and some said false, though that was never 
proved, and she had not the hill-born strength of mind and 
body that these people who had lived nigh a thousand years 
in the same air possessed. Her second son, Filippo, or Lippo, 
inherited her constitution, and with it her supplicating caress 
of manner and her timidity, perhaps her falseness too; but 


40 


SJGNA. 


tlie Lastra did not think so ; the Lastra was fond of Lippo, 
though he had deserted the ways of his fathers, and dwelt in 
an idleness not altogether creditable and altogether alien to the 
habits of his race, who had always been used to labor together, 
father and sons, and often grandsons, all under the same roof 
and on the same fields, generation after generation. 

When the large family dwindled down to the one man, it was 
out of custom to leave so much laud to a solitary laborer. 
But Bruuone Marcillo was a favorite with his master, and one 
of the best husbandmen in the province ; besides, he was sure 
to marry and fill the house, they thought : so he was left un- 
disturbed, and the land suffered nothing ; for, though he loved 
his pleasure in a wild, lawless way, and took fierce fits of it at 
times, he was devoted to his homestead and his work, and loved 
his birthplace with that fast-rooted love of the Tuscan which 
makes the little red roof under the red evening skies, on the 
solitary upland, or in the -silent marsh, or amidst the blue- 
flowered fields of flax, or above the thyme-covered, wind-blown 
hills by the sea, more precious and more lovely than any 
greater fate or fairer gifts elsewhere. 

All alone on his little farm Bruno became a man well-to-do, 
and who could have put money by had he not loved women 
so well, — so they said. 

It was a broad, rich piece of land that went with the dwell- 
ing-house he occupied. He grew wheat and maize, and beans, 
and artichokes, and had several sturdy fig-trees that yielded 
richly, and noble olives that numbered their hundred years, 
and the vines that marched with his corn were among the best 
in the Signa country. ■ , 

The half of all its produce was his, according to the way of 
the land and the provisions of custom ; and the house was a 
better one than most of its degree; and the fields that were 
his lay well on the open hill-side, sun-swept, as was wanted 
by vines and grain both, but sheltered from cold winds by the 
jutting out of the quarried rocks and the woods of ilex and 
pine that were above. 

Bruno was a laborious workman, and was skilled in field- 
labor ; he knew how to make an ear of barley bear double, 
and how to keep blight away, and the fly from the vine. 

He could not read ; he could not write ; his notions of God 
were shut up in a little square colored picture, framed and 


SIGNA. 


41 


hung up over the gateway into his fields to bring a blessing 
there ; his idea of political duty was compressed into hating 
any one who taxed him, and being ready to shoot any one 
who raised the impost on grain ; but he was a husbandman 
after Virgil’s own heart ; he wanted no world beyond the 
waving of his corn, and if a steer were sick, or when the 
grapes were ripe, he took no sleep, but watched all night, 
loving his cattle and his fruits as poets their verse or kings 
their armies. 

On the whole, Bruno led a contented and prosperous life, 
and, if he had not been so ready with his wrath, might have 
been welcome in all households ; and if he had not been over- 
fond of those fairs in all the little towns where wandering 
players set up their little music-booths, and of the women that 
he found there, and of the license that is always to be had by 
any man whose money-bag has its mouth open and its stomach 
filled, Bruno might have become also a very wealthy man in 
his own way. But he was fierce, and every one. feared him, 
and he was improvident, and every one fleeced him. And he 
was lax and lawless in his loves, and had a dangerous name 
in the country-side among the mothers of maidens. 

So that he of all men had had no title to be hard upon 
Pippa : — and yet hard he had been always. 

The most amorous men and the wildest are usually the most 
exacting of virtue and modesty in their own women. 

He had always hated her, — yes, honestly hated her, he told 
himself ; and as she grew up into girlhood, and they were shut 
alone in the same house, always opposed one to another, Pippa’s 
idleness, and sauciness, and rebellion against home-keeping, and 
passion for dancing, and straying and idling, infuriated him 
against her more and more with every day that dawned. 

Bruno, with all his excesses, never neglected or slurred over 
his labor. The land and its needs were always first with him. 
He would have had his sister one of those maidens, numerous 
around him, who asked nothing better than the daily round 
of household and field duties ; who could reap as well as a 
man ; who could harness an ox and guide him ; and who were 
busy from dusk of dawn to nightfall hoeing, drawing water, 
spinning, plaiting, shelling beans, rearing chickens, drying 
tomatoes, setting cauliflowers, thinning fruit-trees, winding 
silk off the cocoons, and went to bed with tired limbs and a 

4 * 


42 


SIGNA. 


light conscience, never dreaming of more pleasure than a stroll 
on a feast-day with a neighbor, or a new white linen skirt for 
some grand church function. 

Why was not Pippa like that, he had asked himself, angrily, 
ten thousand times, instead of a girl that would hardly do as 
much as tie up a few bunches of carnations or St. Catherine 
lilies for the market ? 

fThe Marcillo women had always been reared in strong use- 
fulness and in stern chastity. This handsome, buoyant, gay, 
insolent, idle thing offended him in every way and at every 
turn. 

He would have married her away willingly, and dowered 
her well, to the first honest fellow ; but Pippa had laughed in 
the faces of all the neighbors’ sons who had wanted her to 
wed with them. She was in no hurry, she said. 

She made all the countryside in love with her, and then 
turned her back on it with a saucy laugh, and the sunshine in 
her face was never merrier than whenever she heard that two 
young fellows had quarreled about her and drawn knives on 
each other, and set all the Lastra talking. 

So that when Pippa disappeared many were glad, and none 
very sorry. Bruno smarted with shame, — that was all. 

Indeed, when she was gone away, the townsfolk talked of a 
foreigner, a student and painter, who had been seen with the 
girl at evening on the road, or by the river, or in the shadow 
of the old Lastra bastions ; a young man with a delicate face, 
and a playful way, and a gay tongue, who had wandered on 
foot, with his knapsack and colors, down from the Savoy 
country and into Tuscany, and had danced often with Pippa, 
and had been met with her after sunset on the hill-side. 

But none had told Bruno till too late, being afraid of his 
too ready knife if a hint were taken wrong, and he had known 
nothing of these tales until Pippa had vanished, and even then 
the neighbors were slow to rouse his wrath by telling the 
scanty rumors they had heard. 

Even the young man’s name the people had not known, — 
a youngster lightly come and lightly gone, whom no one took 
account of till of a sudden they noticed that he had been 
unseen since Pippa had been missing. He had lodged a. little 
while above a wine-shop, and gone up and down the river, 
and to and from the old white town, painting ; and had danced 


SIONA. 


43 


at the fairs, and learned to strum on a guitar, and had eaten 
piles of figs, and had been restless and graceful as a fire-fly : 
that was all ; and only a few women had observed as much as 
that. 

^ It told nothing to Bruno ; and, besides, if they had told 
him a hundred times as much, he could have done nothing : 
a contadino is rooted to the soil, and it no more would have 
seemed possible to him to travel into far countries than to 
have used his plowshare for a boat, or driven his steers to turn 
the sea like sod. 

People had hardly ever thought what Pippa’s fate had been. 
If anything great had come to her, the countryside would have 
heard of it. 

In these little ancient burghs and hill-side villages, scattered 
up and down between mountain and sea, there is often some 
boy or girl, with a more wonderful voice, or a more beautiful 
face, a sweeter knack of song, or a more vivid trick of impro- 
visation than the others ; and this boy or girl strays away some 
day with a little bundle of clothes and a coin or two, or is fetched 
away by some far-sighted pedlai^in such human wares, who buys 
them as bird-fanciers buy the finches from the nets ; and then, 
years and years afterwards, the town or hamlet hears indis- 
tinctly of some great prima donna, or of some lark-throated 
tenor, that the big world is making happy as kings and rich 
as kings’ treasurers, and the people carding the flax or shell- 
ing the chestnuts say to one another, “ That was little black 
Lia, or that was our old Momo but Momo or Liii the village 
or the vine-fields never see again. 

If anything great had come in that sort of way to Pippa, 
Signa would have heard of it. There is always some one to 
tell of a success, — always some one to bring word, so that the 
friends may gird up their loins and go and smell out the spoil, 
claim the share of it, and remind Momo, as he comes out of a 
palace, of his barefoot babyhood, and call to Lia’s mind the 
time when she, who now quarrels with princes, was once glad 
of the dog’s bran bread. But none had ever said anything of 
Pippa. She had dropped out of sight and remembrance, and 
no one had asked what had become of her, though the girl had 
been beautiful in her way, darkly, brightly, roughly, tenderly, 
capriciously beautiful, like the barley blowing from shade to sun, 
— only, no man ever would stand her temper, said the women. 


44 


SIGNA. 


That had been conceded everywhere ; and her brothers had 
been pitied. 

Between the day that she had gone over the fields with the 
farewell word to old Viola and the night that she had stumbled 
to her death, over the sea, in the dark road, no one had ever 
heard or known anything of Pippa. 

But it was not because her story was a strange one ; it was 
only because it was so common. Mystery is to the tongue of 
the story-teller as butter to the hungry mongrel ; but what is 
simple is passed over by liuman mouths as daisies by the graz- 
ing horse. 

Her tale was very simple. 

That fair-day in Signa she had been so resolute to go to the 
merry-making because of the stranger who would whirl to the 
thrum of the mandolin as a bat does when a lamp burns, and 
who would come through the bean-fiowers to see her plait straw 
when her brothers were out in the field, and who was gay like 
herself, and passionate, and young, and found but one song 
worth the singing when the sun went down and the fire-flies 
burned. 

Then there had come Bruno’s blow, and the stab in her 
breast ; and all a man’s natural passion of sympathy had been 
aroused, and all a girl’s terror of her fierce brother’s worse ven- 
geance, if only the truth were known. 

And so her lover took her with him when he went back to 
France, while the bean-flowers were still in blossom ; and Pippa 
loved him like a dog : — poor Pippa ! who, always having been 
so saucy of tongue, and stubborn of neck, and proud, and full 
of petulance, clung like a vine, and crouched like a spaniel, 
and trembled like a leaf, when once she loved, as all such 
women do. 

Thus the broad shining Tuscan fields were changed for the 
streets of Paris, and the hills of olive for the roofs of lead, and 
the song of the grilla for the beat of the drum, and the fires of 
the lucciole for the shine of the gas ; and Pippa, a thing of sun 
and wind and sea-blown air, fresh as a fruit and free as a bird, 
was cooped up in a student’s attic, with the roar of the traffic 
forever on her ear, and the glistening zinc of her neighbors’ 
house-roofs forever before her casement. 

He did what he could for her. 

He was a landscape painter and a student of Paris. He 


SIGNA. 


45 


liad a beautiful face, great dreams, ardent passions, and no 
money, except such little pittance as an old doting mother, a 
widow in a little Breton hamlet, could send him by pinching 
herself of oil and bread. For three months he worshiped 
Pippa ; and this scarlet poppy from the Tuscan wheat glowed 
on a hundred canvases in a hundred forms ; and then, of course, 
he tired. Then, of course, the poppy ceased to be a magical 
flower of passion and of sleep ; it seemed only a red bubble, 
blowing useless in the useful corn. 

He thought he hid this from her ; but she felt it before he 
knew it. Women will always do so who love their lives out in 
a year, as Pippa did. 

The Memes, and Bebes, and Lebes around her were happy 
enough, with a pot of mignonette for their garden, and a 
theatre for their heaven, and a Sunday in the woods now and 
then for their liberty. Besides, they could all chatter with 
one another, and change their lovers, if need were, and sing 
little triplets, like little canaries, as they sat sewing at rose- 
colored dance-skirts or twirling up their cambric mock-rose- 
buds. 

But Pippa was in exile. Pippa had the woman’s worst 
crime of loving over-much. Pippa had brought nothing with 
her but her own full, fierce, fond little heart of storm. Pippa 
felt her heart break in this cage. 

Pippa could not read. Pippa knew nothing that he talked 
of, except when he told her that he loved her ; and men get 
weary of saying this too long to the same woman. Pippa could 
only plait straw, — and that not very well ; and no one wanted 
it in Paris. 

Pippa, when in the dance-gardens, one night, struck with a 
knife at a man who would have kissed her, and wounded him 
sorely, and, when hidden away from the perils that arose, could 
not be made to see she had done wrong, because Bruno had 
stabbed her and she had borae him no malice, and here she was 
on her just defense and had done right, she thought. Then 
her lover was wroth with her, and Pippa, whose spirit was 
broken, like that of all fiery creatures when they love, could 
only sob and kiss his feet ; and then he went elsewhere. 

Then came hard winters, and a crying child, and the garret 
was cold and empty, and debt stole in like a ghost, and hunger 
with him, and Pippa sold her pearls, — real pearls, fished up 


46 


SION A. 


from the deep sea by coral-divers, and worn at fairs and feasts 
by her with the honest pride of the true Tuscan peasant. Only 
she never let him know the pearls were sold. She made him 
think that it was one of his own pictures which had brought 
them that little heap of gold. 

But that money lasted very little time, and the child sickened 
and died, and the summer came ; but that would not banish 
hunger ; and Pippa lost her beauty, and her rich, round, ra- 
diant look, and her great brown eyes got a frightened look, — 
because he so seldom kissed her now, and sometimes would 
give her a little gesture like that which a man gives when he 
sweeps away quickly with his elbow some dead flower or 
dropped ashes. Yet still he was good to her, — oh, yes, he was 
good. Pippa told herself so a thousand times a day. He 
never beat her. Pippa, once so saucy and so proud, was grate- 
ful. Love is thus. 

Then another winter came, — the third one : that was hardest. 
They had nothing to eat for many days. They sold their 
clothes and their bed-linen, and even the copper pot in which 
their food was stewed ; and she had no more pearls. 

Pippa had nothing, either, of her beauty left but her straight 
brows and her big lustrous eyes. She was no longer even a 
bright bubble, as the field-poppy was. She was a little dusky 
peasant, pale and starved, and blown among the snow like a 
frozen redbreast. 

“ It is the pictures he cares for,” she had learned to say to 
herself. She had found this out. She got to hate them, the 
senseless things of wood and color, that cost so much money, 
and now had all his looks, all his longings, all his memories, 
all his regrets. 

She hated even those canvas likenesses of herself, that had 
blossomed into being with the purple bean-flowers under the 
summer suns of Signa, when their passion was new-born. 

Pippa loved her lover with the same love, fierce and faith- 
ful and dog-like and measureless, as when he had first taken 
her small head within his hands and kissed her on the eyes 
and mouth. 

But it was a love that could understand nothing, least of all, 
change 

One day, in the bitterness of the mid-winter, after weeks of 
hunger, and the shameful straits of the small debts that make 


SIGNA. 


47 


the commonest act§ and needs of daily life a byword and re- 
proach, she woke to find herself alone. 

There were twenty gold pieces on the bed, long stripped of 
all its covering, and a written line or two. She took the paper 
to the woman of the house below, who read it to her. It told 
her that he was gone to Dresden to copy a famous picture for 
a wealthy man : he sent her all the sum they had advanced 
him, and said a little phrase or two of sorrow and of parting, 
and of hope of better days, and of the unbearable pain of 
such beggary as they had known. He spoke vaguely of some 
union in the future. 

Pippa cast the twenty gold pieces into the mud of the street, 
where the poor scrambled and clutched and fought for them. 
She understood that she was forsaken. 

All he had said was true ; but the great truth was what he 
had not said. Pippa was ignorant of almost everything ; but 
this she knew enough to know. 

That night they took her to a mad-house, and cut close the 
long brown braids of her hair, and fastened together the feet 
that had used to fly as the wind flies, through the paths of the 
vines in summer. 

Poor Pippa I She had always plaited ill ; the women had 
always said so. 

In half a year’s time she gave birth to a child and her rea- 
son came back to her, and after a time they let her go. She 
promised to go to her own country. 

But she cheated them, and went to Dresden. She had kept 
that name in her mind. She got there as best she could, beg- 
ging on the way or working ; but of work she knew so little, 
and of workers there are so many. She carried the child all 
the way. Sometimes people were good to her ; sometimes they 
were bad ; oftenest they were neither one nor the other. In- 
difference is the invincible giant of the world. 

When she reached Dresden, it was summer. The city was 
empty. 

With much trouble she heard of him. The copy was done, 
and he was gone back to France. 

“ Perhaps he does not want you. If he wanted you he would 
not leave you,” said a comely woman, who was sorry for her, 
but who spoke as she thought, giving her a roll of bread under 
a tree in the street. 


48 


SIGN A. 


“ Perhaps he does not want me,” thought Pippa. The 
words awoke her memory. She had been left by him. He 
would not have left her unless he had been tired, — tired of all 
the poverty and all the pain, and of the passion that had lost 
its glow, as the poppy loses its color once being reaped with 
the wheat. 

There was a dull fierce pain in her. There were times when 
she wished to kill him. Then at other times she would see a 
look of his face in the child’s, and would break into an an- 
guish of weeping. 

Anyway, she set backward to find him. 

Carrying the child, that grew heavier with each day, and 
traveling sometimes with gypsies and vagrants and mounte- 
banks, but more often alone and begging her bread on the way, 
she got back into France after many months. She had got 
stupid and stunned with fatigue and with pain. She had lost 
all look of youth, only she kept the child as fresh as a rose ; 
and now and then she would smile, because his mouth laughed 
like her lover’s. 

Back into Paris she went. The strange fortunes that shelter 
the wretched kept her in health and in strength, though she 
rarely had a roof over her at night, and all she ate were the 
broken pieces that people gave her in pity. 

In his old haunts it was easy to hear of him ; he had gone 
to study in Home. 

“ He will do well for himself, never fear,” they said, in the 
old house on the Seine water, where her dream of joy had 
dreamt itself away. Some great person, touched by liis pov- 
erty and genius, and perhaps by his beauty, had given him 
means to pursue the high purposes of his art at leisure. Some 
said the great person was a woman, and a princess : no one 
knew for sure. Anyhow, he was gone to Home. 

Pippa knew the name of Borne. 

People had gone through Signa sometimes, to wind away by 
the sea-road, among the marshes and along the flat sickly 
shores, to Borne. And now and then through Signa, at fair- 
time, or on feast days, there had strayed little children, in 
goat-skins, and with strange pipes, who played sad airs, and 
said they were from Borne. 

But the mountains had always risen between her and Borne. 
It had always been to her far ofi" as some foreign land. Never- 


SIQNA. 


49 


theless, she set out for Rome by the sole way she knew, — the 
way that she had traveled with him, — straight across France 
and downward to the sea, and along the beautiful bold road, 
under the palm-trees and the sea- Alps, and so along the Cor- 
niche back to Signa. 

She knew that way ; and,, toilsome though it was, it was 
made sweet to her by remembered joys. 

He had gone with her ; and at every halting-place there 
was some memory so precious, yet so terrible, that it would 
have been death to her, only the child was there, and wanted 
her, and had his smile, and so held her on to life. He had been 
with her in the summer and autumn weather ; and all the way 
had been made mirthful with love’s happy, foolish ways ; and 
the dust of the road had been as gold to her, because of the 
sweet words he murmured in her ear ; and when they were 
tired they had leaned in each other’s arms, and been at rest ; 
and every moonlit night and rosy morning had been made 
beautiful, because of what they read in each other’s eyes and 
heard in the beating of each other’s hearts. 

Pippa had forgotten nothing ; she had only forgotten that 
she had been forsaken. 

Women are so slow to understand this always; and she, 
since that day when she had flung the money in the street, 
and fallen like a furious thing, biting the dust, and laughing 
horribly, had never been too clear of what had happened to 
her. 

There was the child, and he — her love — was lost. This w^-S 
all she knew. 

Only she remembered every trifle, every moment, of their 
first love- time ; and as she went, walking across great countries 
as other women cross a hay-field or a village street, she would 
look at the rose-bush at a cabin-door and think how he had 
plucked a rosebud there ; or touch a gate-rail with her lips 
because his hand had rested on it ; or lift the child to kiss a 
wayside crucifix because he had hung a rope of woodbine there 
and painted it one noonday ; and at each step would murmur 
to the child, “ See, he was here, — and here, — and here, — and 
here,” and would fancy that it understood, and slept the sweeter 
because told these things. 

Poor Pippa ! — she had always plaited ill. 

Women do, whose only strand is one short human love, 
o 6 


60 


SIQNA. 


The tress will run uneven; and no man wants it long. 
Still, it is best to love thus. For nothing else is Love. 

So she had pressed on, till the golden autumn weather lost 
its serenity, and stirred with strife of winter wind and rain ; 
so she had walked, and walked, and walked, — a beggar-girl for 
all who met her, with no beauty in her, except her great, sad, 
lustrous eyes, — until she had come out once more on that old 
familiar road that she had trodden daily in her childhood and 
her girlhood, with her hank of straw over her arm, and a 
pitcher of milk, or a sheaf of gleaned corn, or a broad basket 
of mulberries balanced on her head. 

She thought she would see Bruno, — just once. He had 
been rough and fierce with her ; but once she could have loved 
Bruno, if he would ever have let her do so. She thought she 
would show him the child, and ask him — if she never got to 
Rome 

Then her foot slipped, and she fell down into darkness, and 
of Pippa there was no more on earth, — only a dead woman, 
that the flood took out with the drowned cattle and the drift- 
wood to the sea. 


CHAPTER VII. 

Local tradition has it that all the plain of Signa was once 
a lake, with only the marsh birds calling and the reeds waving 
in the great silence of its waters — long ago. Their “ long ago” 
is very dim in date and distant, but very close to fancy and to 
faith. Here ASneas is a hero born only yesterday ; and Cati- 
linus brought his secret sins into the refuge of these hills 
an hour since it seems ; and Hercules — one can almost see him 
still, bending his bold brows over the stubborn rock in that 
stream where the quail dips her wing and the distafi* cane bends 
to the breeze. 

Nay, it is not so very far away after all since the dove plucked 
the olive off the mountains yonder, and no one sees anything 
strange or incongruous in the stories that make the sons of 
Enoch and the children of Latona tread these fields side by 


SIONA. 


51 


side, and the silver arrows of Apollo cleave the sunshine that 
the black crucifixes pierce. Nay, older than tale of the Dove 
or legend of Apollo is this soil. Turn it with your spade, and 
you shall find the stone cofiins and the gold chains of the 
mighty Etruscan race whose buried cities lie beneath your 
feet, their language and their history lost in the everlasting 
gloom. 

This was once Etruria, in all the grace and greatness of her 
royalties ; then through long ages the land was silent, and only 
heard the kite shriek or the mountain-hare scream ; then fort- 
ified places rose again, one by one, on the green slopes, and 
Florence set to work and built between her and the sea — be- 
tween her and the coast, and all her many enemies and debtors 
— the walled village of the Lastra-a-Signa ; making it noble 
of its kind, as she made everything that she touched in the 
old time ; giving it a girdle of the massive gray mountain- 
stone, and gateways with carven shields and frescoes ; and 
houses within braced with iron, and ennobled by bold archways 
and poetized by many a shrine and symbol. 

And the Lastra stood in the green country that is called the 
Verdure even in the dry city rolls, and saw the spears glisten 
among the vines, and the steel head-pieces shine through the 
olives, and the banners fiutter down from the heights, and the 
condottieri wind away on the white road, and the long lines 
of the pilgrims trail through the sunshine, and the . scarlet 
pomp of the cardinals burn on the highway, and the great 
lords with their retinues ride to the sea or the mountains, and 
the heralds and trumpeters come and go on their message of 
peace or strife ; and itself held the road, when need arose, 
stanchly, through many a dark day, and many a bitter night, 
for many a tale of years, and kept its warders on its watch- 
towers, looking westward through the centuries of war. And 
then the hour of fate struck, when the black eagle, who had 
“ two beaks to more down,” fiew with his heavy wing over the 
Arno ; and the Republic had no help or hope but in her Grid- 
eon, as she called him, frank Ferruccio. 

Ferruccio knew that the Lastra, set midmost in the highway, 
was the iron key to the gates of Florence. But he had no 
gifts of the gods to make him omniscient, and he was rash, as 
brave men are most apt to be. With his five hundred troopers 
he wrought miracles of valor and relief; but in a fatal hour 


62 


SIONA. 


he, scouting the country in search of the convoys of food that 
he conveyed to Florence, left the Lastra for Pisa ; and the 
traitor Bandini whispered in the ear of Orange, “ Strike now 
— while he is absent.” 

Orange sent his Spanish lances, and the Lastra beat them 
back. 3But he sent them again, as many in numbers against 
the place as was all Ferruccio’s army, and with artillery to 
aid ; and they made two breaches in the walls, and entered, 
and sacked and pillaged, and ravished and slew, the bold gates 
standing erect as they stand to-day. 

Is not the record painted in the Hall of Leo the Tenth ? 

The brave gates stood erect ; but the Lastra was an armed 
town no more. 

Its days of battle were done. 

The grass and the green creepers grew on the battlements ; 
and out of the iron doors there only passed the meek oxen 
and the mules and the sheep. 

The walls of the Lastra are still midmost in the highway, 
with the soft mountain lines and sunset lights behind them ; 
broken down indeed in many places, and with many places 
where there are hillocks of grass and green bushes instead of 
the old mighty stones, or, worse still, where there are mean 
houses and tiled roofs. But they are still erect in a great part 
and very full of gloom and loneliness, with the rope-makers 
at work on the sward underneath them, and the white bullocks 
coming out of their open doors. The portcullis still hangs in 
the gateways that face the east and the west, and the deep 
machicolations of the battlements are sharp and firm as a lion’s 
teeth. There is exquisite color in them, and noble lines 
severe and stern as any that Arnolfo, or Taddeo, drew or 
raised. 

“ She is so old — our Lastra !” say the people, with soft pride, 
while the women sit and spin on the stairs of the old watch- 
towers, and the mules drink, and the wagons pass, and the 
sheep are driven under their pointed archways. 

Of the Lastra it may be written, as Of the old tower of 
Calais church, “ It is not as ruins are, useless and piteous, 
feebly or fondly garrulous of better days ; but useful still, 
going through its daily work, as some old fisherman beaten 
gray by storm yet drawing his daily nets.” 

Its years of war indeed are done ; it can repel no foe, it can 


SFGNA. 


53 


turn aside no invader ; tlie wall-sorrel grows on its parapets, 
the owl builds in its loopholes, the dust of decay lies thick 
upon its broken stairs ; in its fortified places old women spin 
their flax and the spiders their webs ; but its decay is not 
desolation, its silence is not solitude ; its sadness is not despair ; 
the Ave Maria echoes through it morning and night ; its great 
races, the Latteringhi, the Acciajoli, the Capponi, the Pucci, 
the Herli, still are household words beside its hearths ; when 
the warm sunrise smites the battlements, its people go forth to 
the labor of the soil ; when the rays of the sunset fill the 
west, there rise from its mountains a million spears of gold, 
as though the hosts of a conquering army raised them aloft 
with a shout of triumph ; it garners its living people still as 
sheep within a fold — “ its bells for prayer still rolling through 
its rents.” Harvest and vintage and seedtime are precious to 
it ; fruits of the earth are brought within it ; the vine is green 
against its doors, and the corn is threshed in its ancient armo- 
ries ; beautiful even where unsightly, hoary with age, yet 
linked with living youth ; noble as a bare sea-cliflf is noble, 
that has kept the waves at bay throughout uncounted storms, 
the Lastra-a-Signa stands amidst the green billows of the 
foliage of the fields as a lighthouse among breakers: its 
towers speaking of strength, its fissures of sorrow, its granaries 
of labor, its belfries of hope. 

When the great service was over, and the bishop and the 
nobles had passed away in their glory, and the bells had ceased 
for a season to ring, and the white-robed contadini had gone 
up among their hills, and the families of the Lastra had gone 
within-doors and closed their window-shutters to the sun, the 
little singer, who loved every stone of the old place, laying ofi* 
liis little surplice, and by a rare treat being free of task and 
punishment, and sent only to gather salads from the hill-garden 
of his one friend, made his way quickly through the village 
and out by the western gate. 

That was all he was, — a child of Pippa’s, who had died 
without a coin upon her, or a roof she could call her own, or 
anything at all in this wide world except this little sunny- 
headed, sofl-limbed, useless thing, fresh as dew and flushed like 
apple-blossoms, that she left behind her, as the magnolia-loaf, 
dropping brown to the brown earth, leaves a blossom. 

Just a child of Pippa’s, — with no name or use or place or 
6 * 


54 


SiaNA. 


title that any one could see, or right to live at all, if you pushed 
matters closely. 

Himself, he did not know even so much as this, which 
indeed was as bad as nothing to know. To himself he was 
only a foundling, as he was to every one else ; picked up as 
any blind puppy might have been, motherless on the face of 
the flood. 

The old white town had stood him in the stead of father 
and mother and nation and friends ; and though the Church, 
purifying him with baptismal water, had given him a long 
saint’s name, Signa was his true eponymus. 

The children had called him Signa, because of the name on 
the little gilt ball that they were scratched on, — the little gilt 
hall which Nita had hung round his neck by its string again. 

“ It looks well to give it to him,” she had said to her hus- 
band. “ And it would fetch so little, it is not worth keeping 
for oneself” 

So his little locket had been left him, — the locket that had 
been bought that day of the fair, and filled with a curl of 
sunny-brown hair, which Pippa had cut off* herself in the 
dusk where the vines met overhead ; — and he was called after 
the word that was on it first by the children, and then by their 
elders, who had said, “ As well that as any name, why not ? 
the dogs of Jews are often called after the towns that bear 
them ; why not this little cur, so near drowned here, after the 
place that sheltered him?” 

Hence he was Signa, like the town ; and, in a vague fancy 
that he never followed out, he had some dim idea that this 
village of the Lastra, which he loved so dearly, had created 
him out of her dust, or, from her wandering winds, or by her 
bidding to the owls that roosted in her battlements : how he 
did not know, but in some way. And he was thoroughly con- 
tent ; loving the place with a great love, quite reasonless, and 
quite childlike, and yet immeasurable. 

He was proud because he had the name. When they beat 
him, he would not cry out, because the Lastra had been brave, 
— so the old people who told stories of it to him said ; and he 
would be brave likewise. 

It was like his impudence to dare be brave when honest- 
born children squealed like caught mice ! so Nita would say 
to him a score of times, — when slapping his cheek because 


SIGNA. 


55 


Toto had trodden on her gown, or beating him with the rods 
of alder when Toto had stolen the fritters from the frying- 
pan. 

“ She is a good woman, Nita,” said the neighbors, shaking 
out the gleaned hay before their house-doors, or sitting to 
plait together in the archways ; “ Lippo is an angel. To think 
of them — seven children, and an eighth nigh, — and keeping, 
all for charity, that little stray thing found at the flood. Any 
one else had sent it packing, a poor child as one could see by 
its clothes that were all rags, and no chance for any rich folk 
ever coming after it. And yet treating it always like their 
own, share and share alike, and no preference shown — ah, they 
were good people. Old Baldo, too, not saying even a word, 
though he was a sharp man about shoe-leather, and no blame 
to him, because, after all, who will save the skin of your onion 
for you unless you do yourself?” 

As from a baby it grew into a little child, Bruno ever and 
again saw to its wants. 

“ The child must be clean,” he said ; and he would not have 
it go in rags. 

“ The child must be well kept,” he said ; and he would not 
have its curls sheared close, as Toto’s were. 

Then, as it grew older, “ Let the child learn,” he said ; 
and Nita humored him, because she believed it to be his own, 
and Lippo, because of that good half of everything, which 
kept his father-in-law in such good humor, and left him him- 
self free to idle in the sun and lie face downward on the stone 
benches and do nothing all day long except kill flies. 

So Lippo and his wife were very careful to have the child’s 
curls shine, instead of shearing them close as they did their 
own babies, and when he ran into the street would give him 
a big lump of crust to eat as people passed, and on saint’s day’s 
take him with them to the church in a little frock snow-white 
like one of the straight-robed long-haired child-flgures in any 
panel or predella of Francesca or the Memmi. He was so 
pretty that people gave him cakes and fruits and money, just 
for the beauty of his wistful eyes, and to see his little mouth, 
like a carnation bud, open to sing his Aves. 

And of course there was reason that the child, once home, 
should give up the cakes and fruits to the other children, who 
were like foster-brothers and sisters to him ; and as for the 


56 


SIONA, 


money, of course lie could not keep it, being such a little 
thing ; they took it from him to take care of it — they were 
good honest people. 

As for the little thing, true, he was hungry often, and beaten 
often, when no one was looking, and worked like a little foot- 
sore mule at all times. But nobody noticed that, because he 
was always taken to mass, and had the little white shirt on 
just like Toto, and no difference made, and all his curls brushed 
out. The curate’s sister said there never was so sweet a soul 
as Lippo’s, for of course it all was Lippo’s doing ; Nita was an 
honest woman, and true-hearted, but Lippo it was that was 
the saint in the house. Another man would have turned the 
brat out by the ears at first sight : not he ; he cut the stray 
child’s bread as big as any of his boys’, and paid for him, too, 
to learn his letters. 

So the curate’s sister said, and the neighbors after her ; and 
Lippo, being a meek man, smiled gently, and cast his eyes 
down underneath the praise, and said in answer, that no one 
could have turned a pretty baby like that out after once hous- 
ing it, and added, with a kindly grace that moved the women 
to tears, that he hoped the child might be like those gold- 
winged porcellin that, flying in your window with the sun- 
beams, bring good will and peace, the people say. 

This day, after church, the little boy ran over the bridge 
and up the hill-road, where his mother, of whom he knew 
nothing, had met her death. He was stiiF with a severe beat- 
ing that had been given him. 

The night before, there had been a basket of red cherries 
missing, and Toto had been found crunching them in the loft, 
and Toto had said that he had been given them by Signa, who 
first had eaten half; and old Baldo, wlio had got them as a 
present for the priest, had been beside himself with rage, and 
Nita had beaten Signa, as her habit and daily comfort was, 
because he never would cry out, which made him the more 
provoking, and also was always innocent, than which there is 
nothing more irritating anywhere. 

He was very stiff, and felt it now that the music was all 
done ; but almost forgot it again in the pleasure of the hill- 
side and the holiday. 

The country was full of joys to the child that he never 
reasoned about, but which filled him with delight. The great 


SIGNA. 


57 


bold curves of the oak-bough overhead ; the amethyst and 
amber of the trefoil blossoms ; the voices of the wood doves ; 
the jovial croakings of the frogs ; the flash of butterflies ; the 
glories of the oleanders, here white as snow and there rosily 
radiant as flame ; the poppies that had cast their petals, and 
had round gray heads like powdered wigs ; the spiders, red 
and black, like bits of old Egyptian pottery ; the demure and 
dusky cavaletta, that looked like ghosts of nuns, out by an 
error in the daylight ; the pretty lizards that were so happy, 
asking nothing of the world except a sunbeam and a stone to 
sleep under ; the nightingales that were so tame, and sang at 
broad noontide to laugh at poets; the orchids, gold and ruby, 
that mimicked bees and flies to make fun of them, because 
there is so much humor in nature with all her sweet gravity 
of beauty ; the flies that shone like jewels ; the hedges of 
china roses that ran between the corn ; the gaunt stern spikes 
of the artichokes; the green Madonna’s herb; the mountains 
that were sometimes quite lost in the white mists, and then of 
a sudden lifted themselves in all their glory, with black shadows 
where the woods were, and dreamy, hazy breadths of color where 
the bare sandstone and serpentine shone beneath the sun ; — all 
these things, so various, great and small, wonderful and obscure, 
under his feet, or on the far horizon, were sources of delight to 
the child, who as he went lost sight of nothing, from the little 
gemmed insect in the dust he trod to the last glow left on the 
faintest, farthest peak of the Monte Albano range that rose 
between him and the sea. 

Nobody had ever told him anything. 

None had led him by the hand and bidden him look. 

Some instinct moved him to see and hear where others were 
blind and deaf. That was all. 

To the plowman of Ayr the daisy was a tender grace of God, 
and the mouse a fellow-traveler in the ways of life. 

To Signa, who was only a baby still, and was beaten most 
days of the week, and ran barefoot in the dust, the summer 
and the world were beautiful without his knowing why, and 
comforted him. For in this sea of sunshine — as in the music 
— he forgot his pain. 

He ran like a little goat up the road, with the green river 
winding below, and the hills changing at each step with those 
inconstancies of light and shade and aspect and color in which 
c* 


58 


SIGNA. 


all hills delight. It was an hour before, always climbing 
sturdily, he reached an old stone gateway set in breadths of 
grain just golden for the siqkle, with a black crucifix against 
it, and above it a little framed picture of the Annunciation. 

He stooped his knee, and crossed himself ; then ran between 
the old stone posts, which had no gate in them, and sent his 
voice up the hill-side before his feet. “ Bruno ! Bruno ! 
Bruno!” 

“ Here 1” sang the man’s voice in answer from above, among 
the corn. 

Signa climbed the steep green paths that ran between the 
wheat and under the vines up the face of the hill, and threw 
his arms round Bruno’s knees. 

“A whole day to spend !” he cried, breathless with running. 
“And are you working ? Why, it is Corpus Domini. They 
do not work anywhere I” 

Bruno put down the handful of corn that he had just cut 
and wound together. 

“ No ; one should not work,” he said, with some shame for 
his own industry. “ But those clouds look angry ; they may 
mean rain at sunset ; and to spoil such grain as this — and the 
Padre will not come this way ; he never gets so far down on 
feasts. And you are well, Signa?” 

“ Oh, quite well.” 

“ But you must be hungry ? — running so ?” 

“ No ; I can wait.” 

“ You have had your bread, then ?” 

“ Yes.” 

It was not true. But then Signa had found out two things : 
one, that when he told Bruno that he was ill treated or ill fed 
at home, there were quarrels and troubles between Bruno and 
his brother ; and the other, that if he let Bruno see that he 
was at all unhappy, Bruno seemed to be consumed with self- 
reproach. 

So that the child, whose single love, except that for the old 
town itself, was Bruno, had early learned to hold his tongue 
and bear his sorrows silently as best he might, and tell an 
innocent little lie even now and then to spare pain to his friend. 

Bruno always took his part. It was Bruno who got him 
any little joy he ever knew, and Bruno who would not let 
them shave his pretty clustering curls to make a bare round 


SIGNA. 


59 


pumpkin of his head like Toto’s ; and one day when he had 
been only seven years old, and Bruno by chance had found 
him crying, and learned that it was with the smart of Nita’s 
thrashing, Bruno and Lippo had had fierce words and blows ; 
and late that night the eldest boy of Lippo’s had come and 
shaken him in his bed of hay, and hissed savagely in his ear, — 

“ You little fool, if you go telling my uncle Bruno we ill 
treat you, he will strike at my father and kill him perhaps, 
who knows ? he is so violent, and then a nice day’s work you 
will have made for every one ; — you little beast. My father 
dead, and Bruno at the galleys, all through you, who are not 
worth the rind of a rotten melon, little cur !” 

And Signa, trembling in his bed, had vaguely understood 
the mischief he might do, though why they quarreled for him, 
and why Lippo gave him a home and yet ill treated him, or 
why Bruno should have any care to take his part, he could 
not tell ; but he comprehended that all he had to do was to 
accept ill usage dumbly like the dogs, and bring no one into 
any trouble by complaining. And so he grew up with silence 
for a habit ; for he loved Bruno. 

Bruno, who was fierce and wayward and hated and feared 
by every one on the country-side, but who to him was gentle 
as a woman, and was always kind. Bruno, who had a most 
terrible knack of flashing out his knife in anger, and who had 
quarreled with all the women he had wooed, and who had a 
rough heartless way of speech that made people wonder he 
could be of the same blood and bone as mild and pleasant 
Lippo, but who to him was never without a grave soft smile 
that took all the darkness from this face it shone on, and who 
for him had many tender thoughts and acts that were like the 
blue radish-flower on its rough, gray, leafless stalk. 

The child never wondered why Bruno cared for him. Child- 
ren take love as they take sunshine and their daily bread. 
If it rain and they starve, then they wonder ; because children 
come into the world with an innocent undoubting conviction 
that they will be happy in it, which is one of the oddest and 
the saddest things one sees ; for, being begotten by men and 
borne by women, how can such strange error ever be alive in 
them ? 

Bruno put by his reaping-hook, and let the big-bearded 
Turkish wheat stand over for another day. He had risked 


60 


SIQNA, 


his own soul to make sure of the wheat, — for to Bruno it was 
a soul’s peril to use a sickle on a holy day, — but he let go the 
corn rather than spoil the little fellow’s pleasure. 

“ You can eat something again — come,” he said, stretching 
his hand out to the boy’s. 

Pippa’s child was like her, only with something spiritual 
and far-reaching in his great dark eyes that hers had never 
had, and a gleam of gold in the soft thickness of his hair that 
did not come from her. He was more delicate, more slender, 
more like a little supple reed, than Pippa ever had been, and 
he had a more uncommon look about him ; but he was like 
her, — like enough to make Bruno still shudder now and then, 
thinking of the dead woman left all alone to the rain and to 
the river. 

“ Come and eat,” he said, and took the child in-doors. 

His house had a great arched door, where Pippa had stood 
plaiting many a night. It had a brick floor, and a ceiling of 
old timbers, and some old dusky chests and presses that would 
have fetched a fortune in city curiosity-shops, and a strong 
musty smell of drying herbs and of piles of peas and beans 
for winter uses, and trusses of straw cleaned and cut for the 
plaiters ; and hens were sitting on their eggs inside an old 
gilded marriage-cofler six hundred years old if one, whose lid, 
that had dropped off the hinges, was illuminated with the nup- 
tials of Gralileo in the style of the early school of Cortona. 

Through a square unglazed window there was seen the head 
of a brindled cow munching grass in her shed on the other 
side, and through a wide opening opposite that had no door, 
the noon sun shining showed the great open building that 
was granary and cart-shed, and stable and hot-house all in 
one, and where the oil-presses stood, and the vats for the 
wine, and the empty casks. 

Against one of the walls was a crucifix, with a little basin 
for holy water, for Bruno was a man who believed in the saints 
without question ; and above the arched entrance there grew 
a great mulberry-tree that was never stripped, because he had 
no silkworms ; and magnolias and cistus-bushes, and huge pop- 
pies that loved to glow in the stones, and big dragon-heads 
burning like rubies, and Arabian jessamine of divinest odor, 
and big myrtles, all flourishing luxuriant alike together, be- 
cause in this country flowers have nine lives like cats, and will 


SIGNA. 


61 


live anywhere, just because no one wants them or ever thinks 
of gathering them unless there be a corpse to be dressed. 

“ Eat,” said Bruno ; and he got the little lad out some 
brown bread, and a jug of milk, and a cabbage-leaf of cur- 
rants, which he had gathered early that morning before the 
mass-bells rang, being sure that Signa would come before the 
day should be over. 

Signa ate and drank with the eager good will of a child 
who never got enough, except by some rare chance on a feast- 
day like this ; but the larger part of the currants he left on 
the leaf, taking only one or two bunches. 

Bruno watched him. 

“ Are you going to give them away?” 

“ I will give them to Gemma — I may ?” 

“ Do as you like with your own. But if you must give 
them to any one, give them to Palma.” 

Signa colored on both his little pale cheeks. 

“ I will give them to the two,” he said, conscious of an un- 
just intention nipped in the bud. 

“ Palma is a better child than Gemma,” said Bruno, sharp- 
ening a vine-stake with his clasp-knife. 

Signa hung his head. 

“ But I like Gemma best.” 

“ When that is said, there is no more to be said,” answered 
Bruno, who had learned enough of human nature on the hills 
and in the Lastra to know that liking does not go by reason 
nor follow after merit. 

“ Gemma is so pretty,” said the little fellow, who loved any- 
thing that had beauty in it ; and he ran and got his mandolin 
out of the corner where Bruno let him keep it, and began to 
turn its keys and run his fingers over its strings and call the 
cadence out of it with as light a heart as if his back had never 
been black and blue with Nita’s thrashing. 

If Gemma broke your chitarra, would you like her the 
better then ?” asked Bruno. 

“ I should hate her,” said Signa, under his breath ; for he 
had two idols, — his lute and the Lastra. 

“ I wish she would break it, then,” said Bruno, who was 
jealous of this little child for whom Signa was saving his cur- 
rants. 

But Signa did not hear. He was sitting out on the 


62 


SIGNA. 


threshold, on an empty red lemon-pot turned upside down, with 
the slope of the autumn corn and the green hill-side beneath 
him in the sun, and beyond them, far down below in the great 
valley, and golden in the light, were first the walls of the Las- 
tra set in the sea of vines, and then the towers and domes of 
Florence far away ; and farther yet, where the east was warm 
with motning light, the mountains of Umbria, with the little 
towns on their crest, from which you see two seas. 

With all that vast radiant world beneath him at his feet, 
Signa tuned his mandolin and sang to himself untired on the 
still hill-side. The cow leaned her mouth over the window- 
sill, and listened, — cows seem so stupid chewing grass and 
whisking fiies away, but in their eyes there is the soul of lo ; 
the nightingales held their breaths to listen, and then joined 
in till all the branches that they lived in seemed alive with 
sound ; the great white watch-dog from the marshes came and 
lay down quite quiet, blinking solemnly with attentive eyes ; 
but the cicali never stopped sawing like carpenters in the tree- 
tops, nor the gossiping hens from clacking in the cabbage-beds, 
because cicali and chickens think the world was made for 
them, and believe that the sun would fall if they ceased from 
fussing and fuming : — they are so very humam. 

Bruno laid himself down face forward on a stone bench, as 
contadini love to do when they have any leisure, and listened 
too, his head upon his arms. 

The water dropped from the well-spout ; a lemon fell with 
a little splash on the grass ; the big black restless bees buzzed 
here and there ; blue butterfiies danced above the grain as if 
the cornfiowers had risen winged ; the swallows wheeled round 
the low red-tiled roof ; the old wooden plow lay in the shade 
under the fig-trees ; the oxen ate clover and the leaves of cane, 
in fragrant darkness in their shed ; the west wind came from 
the pines above with the smell of the sea and the thyme and 
the rosemary. 

Signa played and sang, making up his song as he went 
along, in rhymes strung like chains of daisies, all out of his 
own head, and born in a moment out of nothing, beginning 
with the name of a flower, and winding in with them the sun 
and the shadow, the beasts and the birds, the restless bees and 
the plowshare at rest, and the full wheat-ears and the empty 
well-bucket, and anything and everything, little and large, and 


SIGNA. 


63 


foolish and wise, that was there about him in the midsummer 
light. 

Anywhere else it might have been strange for a little peasant 
to make melody so ; but here the children lisp in numbers, and 
up and down on the hills, and in the road when the mule-bells 
ring, and on the high mountains with the browsing goats, the 
verse and song of the people fill the air all day long, — this 
people who for the world have no poet. 

Bruno, lying face downward and listening half asleep to the 
rippling music, thought it pretty, but nothing rare or of won- 
der ; the little lad played better than most of his age, and had 
a gift for stringing his rhymes, that was all. 

For himself, he was almost jealous of the lute, as he was of 
the child Gemma. For Bruno loved the boy with a covetous 
love and a strong love, and felt as if in some way or other 
Signa escaped him. 

The boy was loving, obedient, grateful, full of caressing and 
tractable ways ; there was no fault to find with him ; but 
Bruno at times felt that he held him no more surely than one 
holds a bird because it alights at one’s feet. 

It was a vague feeling with him. Bruno, being an un- 
learned man, did not reason about his impressions nor seek to 
know whether they were even wise ones. But it was a strong 
feeling, and something in the far-away look of the little lad’s 
eyes, as he sang, strengthened it. 

Pippa had never had that look ; no one had it except the 
little Christs or St. Johns sometimes in the old frescoes in the 
churches that Bruno would enter once a year or so, when he 
went to Prato or Carmignano or Pistoia to buy grain or to 
sell it. 

“ That is God looking out of their eyes,” an old sacristan 
said once to him, before one of those altar-pictures, where the 
wonderful faces were still radiant amidst the fading colors of 
the age-dimmed frescoes. 

But why should God look out of the eyes of Pippa’s child ? 

Why was God in him more than in any others ? 

Those children in the frescoes were most fitting in their 
place, no doubt, among the incense, and the lilies, and the 
crosses, and above the sacred Host. But to sit at your bench, 
and eat beans, and be sent to fetch in sheep from the hills, — 
Bruno felt that a more work-day soul was better for this : he 


64 


SIGNA. 


would have been more at ease if Signa had been just a noisy 
idle, troublesome, merry morsel, playing more like other boys, 
and happy over a baked goose on a feast day. He would have 
known better how to deal with him. 

And yet not for worlds would he have changed him. 


CHAPTER yill. 

If Pippa had not been quite dead that night when they 
had found her in the field ? If there had been any spark of 
life flickering in her that with warmth and care and a surgeon’s 
skill might have been fanned back again into a steady flame ? 
It was not likely, but it was possible. And if it had been so, 
then what were he and Lippo ? 

• The sickly thought of it came on him many a time and 
made him shiver and turn cold. When he had left the woman 
lying in the field he had been quite sure that all life was gone 
out of her. But now he was not so sure. Cold and the fall 
might have made her only senseless : who could tell ? If they 
had done their duty by her, Pippa might have been living now. 

It was not probable. He knew the touch of a dead thing ; 
and she had felt dead to him as any slaughtered sheep could 
be. But sometimes in the long lonely nights of autumn, 
when he sat watching the grapes with his gun against his 
knee, lest thieves should strip the vines, Bruno would think 
of it, and say to himself, “ If she were not really dead, what 
was I ?” He told all to the good priest in the little brown 
church beneath the pines on his hill, — told all under seal of 
confession ; and the priest absolved him by reason of his true 
penitence and anxious sorrow. But Bruno could not absolve 
himself. He had left her there for the flood to take her : — 
and after all she might have been brought back to life had he 
lifted her up on his shoulders and borne her down into shelter 
and warmth, instead of deserting her there like a coward. 

The water had done it ; had washed her away out of sight, 
and had killed her, — if she were not already dead when it rose 
and swept her away to the secrecy of the deep sea. But he 


SIGN A. 


65 


told himself at times that it was he who was the murderer, — 
not the water. 

When he looked at the river, shining away between the 
green hills and the gray olives, he felt as if it knew his guilt ; 
as if it were a fellow-sinner with him, only the more innocent 
of the two. Of course tlie pain and the torment of such 
self-accusation were not always on him. He led an active life ; 
he was always working at something or another from day- 
break till bedtime ; the free, fresh air blew always about him 
and drove morbid fancies away. But at times, when all was 
quiet in the hush of midnight, or when he rested from his 
labors at sunset and all the world was gold and rose, then he 
thought of Pippa, and he felt the cold, pulseless breast under- 
neath his hand ; then he said to himself, “ If she were not 
quite dead ?” The torment of the thought worked in him, 
and weighed on him, and made his heart yearn to the little 
lad, who, but for his cowardice, might not have been mother- 
less and alone. 

Bruno sat on at his house door that night, watching the little 
. lad run along the hill. He could see all the way down the 
slope, and though the trees and the vines at times hid Signa 
from sight, and at times he was lost in the wheat, which was 
taller than he, yet at intervals the small flying figure, with the 
sunset about his hair, could be seen going down, down, down 
along the great slope, and Bruno watched it with a troubled 
fondness in his eyes. 

He was doing the best for the child that he knew. He had 
him taught to read and write ; he had him sing for the priests ; 
he was learning the ways of the fields, and the needs of beasts, 
tending his sheep and Lippo’s by turns, as a little contadino 
had to do in the simple life of the open air. He could not 
tell what more to do for him ; he a peasant himself and the 
son of many generations of peasants, who had worked here one 
after another on the great green hill above the Lastra valley. 

He did not know what else to do. 

That was the way he had been brought up, except that he 
had never been taught a letter ; running with bare legs over 
the thyme on the hills, and watching the sheep on the high 
places among the gorse, and pattering through the dirt after 
the donkey when there were green things to go in to market, 
or loads of fir cones to be carried, or sacks of corn to be borne 

6 * 


66 


SIONA. 


to the grinding-press. If there was a better way to bring up 
a child he did not know it. And yet he was not altogether 
sure that Pippa, if she saw, from heaven, were satisfied. 

The child was thinner than he liked, and his shirt was all 
holes, and never a little beggar was poorer clad than was Signa 
winter and summer ; and Bruno knew that he gave into Lippo’s 
pocket more than enough to keep a child well, for his land was 
rich, and he labored hard, and he bore with Lippo’s coming 
and going, and prying and calculating always to make sure 
how much the grain yielded, and to count the figs and pota- 
toes, and to watch the winepress, and to see how the peas 
yielded, and to satisfy himself that he always got the full 
amount that they had agreed for ; he bore with all that from 
Lippo, though it was enough to exasperate a quieter man, and 
many a time he could have kicked his brother out of his fields 
for all that meddling and measuring, and, being of an impa- 
tient temper and resentful, chafed like a tethered mastiff, to 
have Nita and her brood clamoring for roots and salads and 
eggs and buckwheat, as if he were a slave for them. 

“ The half of all I get,” he had said, in the rash haste of 
his repentance and remorse ; and Lippo pinned him to his 
word. 

He would have given the world that instead of that mad 
bargain made without thought, he had taken the child to him- 
self wholly and told the truth in the Lastra, and given the 
poor dead body burial, and been free to do with Pippa’s boy 
whatever he chose. But Bruno, like many others, had fallen 
by fear and haste into a false way ; and stumbled on in it 
galled and entangled. 

Bruno was now over forty years old, and his country-folk 
spoke more ill of him rather than less. When he went down 
into th« Lastra to sit and take a sup of wine and play a game 
at dominoes as other men did, none were glad to see him. The 
women owed him a grudge because he married none of them, 
and the men thought him fierce and quarrelsome, when he was 
not taciturn, and found that he spoiled mirth rather than in- 
creased it by his presence. 

He was a handsome man still, and lithe, and burnt brown 
as a nut by the sun. He wore a loose shirt, open at the 
throat, and in winter had a long brown cloak tossed across 
from one shoulder to the other. He had bare feef, and the 


SIONA. 


67 


walk of a mountaineer or an athlete. Marching besides his 
bullocks, with a cart-load of hay, or going down to the river 
for fish, with his great net outspread on its circular frame, he 
was a noble, serious, majestic figure, and had a certain half 
wild, half lordly air about him that is not uncommon to the 
Tuscan peasant when he lives far enough from the cities not 
to be contaminated by them. 

The nine years that had run by since the night of the flood 
had darkened Bruno’s name in the Lastra country. 

Before that night he had been, whatever other faults or 
vices he had had, open-handed to a degree most rare among 
his people. A man that he had struck to the ground one day, 
he would open his leathern bag of coppers to the next. What- 
ever other his crimes, he had always been generous, to utter 
improvidence, which is so strange a thing in his nation that 
he was often nicknamed a madman for it. But no one quar- 
rels with a madness that they profit by, and Bruno’s gener- 
osity had got him forgiven many a misdeed, many a license, by 
men and women. 

Since the flood, little by little, parsimony growing on him 
with each year, he had become careful of spending, quick 
to take his rights, and slow to fling down money for men’s 
sport or women’s kisses. The country said that Bruno was 
altogether given over to the devil, he was no longer good to 
get gain out of even, he had turned niggard. 

And there was no excuse for him, they averred ; a better 
padrone no man worked under than he, and his fattore was 
old and easy ; and the land that in the old time had served 
to maintain his father and mother with a tribe of children to 
eat them out of house and home, now had only himself upon 
it, good land and rich, and sheltered though on the mountains, 
whilst, as every one knows, the higher the land lies the better 
is the vintage. 

Men gossiping in the evenings under the old gateways of 
the Lastra, watching Bruno with his empty bullock-cart go 
back between the hedges to the bridge, would shake their 
heads : — 

“A bad fellow !” said Momo, the barber, for Bruno never 
came to have his head shaved as clean Christians should in 
summer, but wore his thick dusky mane tossed back much 
like a lion’s. 


68 


SIGN A. 


“ Brutal bad !” echoed Papucci, who was a blacksmith, with 
slow work. “ No doubt that little byblow is his own, and see 
how he fathers it on Lippo. Lippo has good as told me it 
was that poor Dina’s child by Bruno ; you remember her, a 
pretty young girl, died of a ball in the throat, — or they said 
so : very likely it was Bruno, that wrung her neck in a rage, 
— I should not wonder. He would have left the boy to starve, 
only Lippo took it home, and shamed him.” 

“ He is good to the child now,” said Noa, the tinman, who 
had a weakness for seeing both sides of a question, which made 
him very disagreeable company. 

“ Oh hi !” demurred the barber, with his under-lip out in 
dubious reply. “ The other day the little lad was bathing with 
my youngster, and I saw his back all blue and brown with 
bruises. ‘ Is he such a bad child you beat him so ?’ I said to 
Lippo, for indeed he was horrid to look at, and Lippo, good 
man, looked troubled. ‘ Bruno will be violent,’ he told me, 
quite reluctantly : ‘ he forgets the child is small.’ Oh, I dare 
say he does forget, and when he has him alone there flays him 
of half his skin !” 

“ Why say the child was Bruno’s or Dina’s, either ? He was 
found in the flelds at the great flood, and Dina was dead a 
year before,” said Noa, who had that awkward and unsocial 
quality, a memory. “Not but what I dare say it is Bruno’s,” 
he added, with an after-thought willing to be popular; “ and 
perhaps he pays for it !” 

“ No, not a stiver,” said the cooper. “ Lippo and Nita have 
said to me a score of times, ‘We took the boy from pity, and 
we keep it from pity. Not a pin’s worth shall we ever see 
back again this side heaven. But what matter that ? When 
we feed eight mouths it is not much to feed a ninth.’ They 
are good people, Lippo and his wife.” 

“Grood as gold,” said Brizzo, the butcher, “and saving 
money, or I suppose it is old Baldo’s ; they have bought that 
little podere up at Santa Lucia ; a snug little place, and twenty 
little Maremma sheep upon it as fat as I have ever put knife 
into. Lippo has God’s Grace.” 

“A fair-spoken man always, and good company,” said Moino, 
who had shaved him bare and smooth as a melon that very 
morning. 

This was the general opinion in the Lastra. Lippo, who 


SIGN A. 


69 


had always a soft smart word for everybody ; who smiled so on 
people who knew he hated them, that they believed they were 
loved whilst he was smiling; who was always ready for a nice 
game at dominoes or cards, and, if he did cheat a little, did it 
so well that no one could fail to respect him the more for it ; 
Lippo was well spoken of by his townsfolk, and one of the 
Council of the Misericordia had been often heard to say that 
there was not a better man in all the province. 

But Bruno, now that he chose to save money, was a very 
son of the fiend, without a spot of light anywhere. Now 
that he would never drink, and now that he would never 
marry, the Lastra gave him over to Satan, body and soul, and 
for all time. 

Bruno cared nothing at all. They might split their throats, 
for any notice that he took. 

“ 111 words rot no wheat,” he would say to his one friend, 
Cecco, the cooper, who lived across by the bridge, and had a 
workshop with a great open arch of thirteenth-century sculp- 
ture, and a square window with crossed bars of iron, and a 
screen of vine-foliage behind it that might have been the back- 
ground of a pieta, — so beautiful was it when the sun shone 
through the leaves. 

He yent on his own ways, plowing with his oxen, pruning 
his olives, sowing and reaping, and making the best of his 
land, and going down on market-days into the city, looking as 
if he had stepped out of Grhirlandajo’s canvas, but himself 
knowing nothing of that, nor thinking of anything except the 
samples of grain in his palm or the cabbages in his cart; 
Bruno cared nothing for other folk’s opinions. 

What he cared for was to keep faith with Pippa in that 
mute compact born of his remorse, which he firmly believed 
the saints had witnessed on her behalf. 

He had cared nothing for the child at first, but as it had 
grown older, and each year caught hold of his hand mere 
fondly, as if it felt a friend, and lifted up to him its great soft 
serious eyes, a personal afiection for this young life which he 
alone protected grew slowly upon him ; and as the boy became 
older, and the intelligence and fancies of his eager mind awed 
Bruno whilst they bewildered him, Bruno loved him with the 
deep love of a dark and lonely soul, for the sole thing in which 
it makes its possibility of redemption here and hereafter. 


70 


SIGN A. 


He sat on at the house-door now, and watched the running 
figure of the boy so long as it was in sight. When t]ie bottom 
of the hill was reached and the path turned under the lower 
vines, he lost him quite, and only knew that he must still be 
running on, on, on, under all those roofs and tangle of green 
leaves. 

He was not quite at ease about him. The boy never com- 
plained; nay, if questioned, insisted he was happy. But 
Bruno mistrusted his brother, and he doubted the peace of 
that household. The children, always groveling and scream- 
ing, greedy and jealous, he hated. It was not the nest for 
this young nightingale, — that he felt. But he did not see 
what better to do. 

Lippo held him fast by his word ; and he had no proof that 
the boy was really ill used. Sometimes he saw bruises on him, 
but there was always some story of an accident or of a childish 
quarrel to account for these, or of some just punishment, and 
he, roughly reared himself, knew that boys needed such ; and 
Signa’s lips were mute, or, if they ever did open, said only, 
“ They are good to me,” — a lie for which he confessed and 
besought pardon on his knees in the little dark corner in the 
Misericordia church. 

Still Bruno was not satisfied. But what to alter he knew 
not, and he was not a man who could spare time or acquire 
the habit of holding communion with his own thoughts. 

When the child had quite gone out of sight, he rose and 
took his sickle again and went back to his wheat. 

He seldom had any one in to help him ; men were careless 
sometimes, and split the straw in reaping, and spoiled it for 
the plaiters. He generally got all the wheat in between St. 
John’s day and St. Peter’s ; and the barley he took later. 

The evening fell suddenly ; where this land lies they lose 
the sunset because of the great rise of the hills ; they see a 
great globe of fire dropping downward, it touches the purple 
of the mountain, and then all is night at once. 

The bats came out, and the night kestrils, and the wood 
owls, and went hunting to and fro. Nameless melodious 
sounds echoed from tree to tree. The cicali went to bed, and 
the grill hummed about in their stead ; they are cousins, only 
one likes the day and the other the night. The fire-flies 
flitted faint and falling over the fallen corn. When the wheat 


SIGNA. 


71 


was reaped their day was done. Later on, a faint light came 
above the far Umbrian hills, — a faint light in the sky like the 
dawn ; then a little longer, and out of the light rose the moon, 
a round world of gold ablaze above the dark, making the tree- 
boughs that crossed her disk look black. 

But Bruno looked at none of it. 

He had not eyes like Pippa’s child. 

He stopped and cut his wheat, laying it in ridges tenderly. 
The fire-flies put out their lights, because the wheat was dead. 

But the glow-worms under the leaves in the grass shone on ; 
they were pale and blue, and they could not dance ; they never 
knew what it was to wheel in the air, or to fly so high that 
men took them for stars ; they never saw the tree-tops, or the 
nests of hawks, or the lofty magnolia-flowers ; the fire-flies 
only could do all that ; but then the glow-worms lived on from 
year to year, and the death of the wheat was nothing to them ; 
they were worms of good sense, and had holes in the ground. 

They twinkled on the sod as long as they liked, and pitied 
the flre-flies, burning themselves out by soaring so high, and 
dying because their loves were dead. 


CHAPTER IX. 

The child Signa ran on through the soft gray night. 

Toto was afraid of the night, but he — never. 

The fire-flies ran with him along the waves of the standing 
corn. Wheat was cut first on the sunniest land, and there 
was much still left unreaped on the lower grounds. " 

One wonders there are no fairies where there are fire-flies ; 
for fire-flies seem fairies. But no fairies are found where the 
G-reek gods have lived. Frail Titania has no place beside 
Bemeter ; even Puck will not venture to rufile Pan’s sleep ; 
and where the harp of Apollo Cynthmrides was once heard 
Ariel does not dare sing his song to the bees. 

Signa caught a fire-fly in his hand and watched it burn a 
minute, and then let it loose again, and ran on his way. 

He wished he could be one of them, up in the air so high, 


72 


SIQNA. 


with that light always showing them all they wished to know ; 
seeing how the owls lived on the roofs of the towers, and how 
the bees ruled their commonwealth on the top of the acacias, 
and how the snow-blossom came out of the brown magnolia 
spikes, and how the cypress-tree made her golden balls, and 
how the stone-pine added cubits to his height so noiselessly 
and fast, and how the clouds looked to the swallows that lived 
so near them on the chapel belfries, and how the wheat felt 
when it saw the sickle, and whether it was pained to die and 
leave the sun, or whether it was glad to go and still the pain 
of hungry children. Oh, what he would ask and know, he 
thought, if only he were a fire-fly ! 

But he was only a little boy, with nothing to teach him any- 
thing, and a heart too big for his body, and no wings to rise 
upon, but only feet to carry him, that were often tired, and 
bruised, and weary of the dust. 

So he ran down towards the Lastra, stumbling and going 
slowly, because he was in the dark, and also because he was so 
constantly looking upward at the fire-flies that he lost his foot- 
ing many times. 

Across the bridge, he turned aside and went up into the 
fields to the right of him before he walked on to the Lastra. 

Between the bridge and the Lastra it is a picturesque and 
broken country. On one side is the river, and on the other 
hilly ground, green with plumes of corn, and hedges of brier- 
rose, and tall rustling poplars, and up above, cypresses ; and 
old villas noble in decay, and monasteries with frescoes crumb- 
ling to dust, and fortresses that are barns and stables for cattle, 
-and convent chapels whose solitary bell answers the bells of the 
goats as they graze. 

Signa ran up the steep grassy ways a little, and through a 
field or two under the canes, twice his own height, and came 
to a little cottage, much lower, smaller, and more miserable than 
Bruno’s house, — a cottage that had only a few roods of soil 
apportioned to it, and those not very arable. 

Before its door there were several sheaves of corn lying on 
the ground ; all its produce except the few vegetables it yielded. 
The grain had been cut the day before, and was not carried in 
on account of the day being a holy one, for its owner did not 
venture to risk his hereafter as Bruno had dared to do. 

The man was sitting on the stone bench outside his door, — 


SIGNA. 


73 


a good-humored fellow, lazy, stupid, very poor, but quite con- 
tented. He was one of the laborers in the gardens of a great 
villa close by, called Giovoli. He had many children, and was 
as poor as it is possible to be without begging on the roads. 

“ Where is Gemma?” called Signa. The man pointed in- 
doors with the stem of his pipe. 

“ Gone to bed, and Palma too, and I go too, in a minute or 
less. You are out late, little fellow.” 

“ I have been with Bruno,” said Signa, unfolding his cab- 
bage-leaf and his currants in the starlight, that was beginning 
to gleam through the deep shadow of the early evening. 
“ Look, I have brought these for Gemma ! May I run in and 
give them to her? They are so sweet 1” 

The gardener, who was called Sandro by everybody, his name 
being Alessandro Zanobetti, nodded in assent. He was a good- 
natured, idle, mirthful soul, and could never see why Lippo’s 
wife should treat the child so cruelly ; he had plagues enough 
himself, but never beat them. 

“ If Gemma be asleep, she will wake if there be anything 
to get,” he said, with a little chuckle: himself he thought 
Palma worth a thousand of her. 

Signa ran in-doors. 

It was a square-built place, all littered and untidy ; there 
were hens at roost, and garden refuse, and straw, with a kid 
and its mother on it ; and a table, and a bench or two, and a 
crucifix with a bough of willow, and in the corner a bed of 
hay upon the floor, sweet-smelling, and full of dry flowers. 

Two children were in it, all hidden in the hay, except their 
heads and the points of their feet. 

One was dark, a little brown strong soft-eyed child, and the 
other was of that curious fairness, with the hair of reddened 
gold, and the eyes like summer skies, which the old Goths 
have left here and there in the Latin races. Both were 
asleep. 

They were like two little amorini in any old painting, with 
their curving limbs, and their curly heads, and their rosy 
mouths, curled up in the withered grasses ; the boy did not 
know anything about that, but he vaguely felt that it was 
pretty to see them lying so, just as it was to see a cluster of 
pomegranate-flowers blowing in the sun. 

Signa stole up on tiptoe, and, touching the cheek of the fair 
D 7 


74 


SION A. 


one with a bunch of currants, laughed to see her blue bright 
eyes open wide on him with a stare. 

“ I have brought you some fruit, G-emma,” he said, and 
tried to kiss her. 

“ Give me ! give me quick !” cried the little child, tumbling 
up half erect in the hay, the dried daisies in her crumpled 
curls, and her little bare chest and shoulders fit for a statue 
of Cupid. She pushed away his lips ; she wanted the fruit. 

“ If I do not eat it quick, Palma will wake,” she whispered, 
and began to crunch them in her tiny teeth as the kid did its 
grasses. The dark child did wake, and lifted herself on her 
elbow. 

“ It is Signa I” she cried, with a little coo of delight like a 
wood-pigeon’s. 

“ I kept you no currants, Palma !” said Signa, with a sud- 
den pang of self-reproach. He knew that he had done un- 
kindly. 

Palma looked a little sorrowful. They were very poor, and 
never hardly tasted anything except the black bread like the 
dogs. 

“ Never mind ; come and kiss me,” she said, with a little 
sigh. 

Signa went round and kissed her. But he went back to 
Gemma again. 

“ Good-night,” he said to the pretty white child sitting up 
in the hay ; and he kissed her once more. So Gemma was 
kissed twice, and had the currants as well. 

Palma was used to that. 

Signa ran out with a hardened conscience. He knew that 
he had been unjust; but then if he had given any of the 
currants to Palma, Gemma never would have kissed him at 
all. 

He liked them both ; little things of eight and nine, living 
with their father and their brothers, close to the gates of the 
great garden, low down on the same hill where, higher, Lippo’s 
sheep were kept. 

He liked them both, having seen them from babyhood, and 
paddled in the brook under the poplars with them, and strung 
them chains of berries, and played them tunes on the pipes 
he cut from the reeds. They were both his playfellows, pretty 
little things, half naked, bare-footed, fed by the air and the 


SIGNA. 


75 


sun, and tumbling into life, as little rabbits do among the 
grass. 

But Palma he did not care about, and about Gremma he did. 
For Gemma was a thousand times the prettier, and Palma 
loved him always, that he knew ; but of Gemma he never was 
so sure. 

Nevertheless, he knew he had not done them justice about 
those currants, and he was sorry for it, as he ran along the 
straight road into the Lastra, and with one look upward to the 
gateway that he loved, though he could not see the blue on 
the parapet because it was dark, he darted onward quickly, 
lest the gates should close for the night and he be punished 
and turned backward, and hurried up the passage into Lippo’s 
house. 

Lippo lived in a steep paved road above the ancient Place 
of Arms, close to the open-arched loggia of what used to be 
the wood market against the southern gate. There is no great 
beauty about the place, and yet it has light and shade, and 
color, and antiquity, to charm a Prout or furnish a Canaletto. 
The loggia has the bold round arches that most Orcagna loved ; 
the walls have the dim, soft browns and grays of age, with 
flecks of color where the frescoes were ; through the gateway 
there come the ox-carts, and the mules, and the herds of goats 
down the steep paved way ; there is a quiver of green leaves, 
a breadth of blue sky, and at the bottom of the passage-way 
there is a shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel, so old that the 
people can tell you nothing of it ; you can see the angels still 
with illumined wings, and the Virgin with rays of gold, who 
sits behind a wicket of gray wood, with a carven M interlaced 
before her, and quaint little doors that open and shut ; but of 
who first made it or set it up there for worship, they can tell 
you nothing at all. 

It is only a bit of the Lastra that nobody sees except the 
fattori rattling over the stones in their light carts, or the con- 
tadini going in for their masters’ letters, or now and then a 
noble driving to his villa, and the country folks coming for 
justice or for sentence to the Prefettura. But there is beauty 
in it, and poetry ; and the Madonna who sits behind her little 
gray gate has seen so much since first the lilies of liberty were 
carved on the bold east gate. 

The boy’s heart beat quick as he went up the stairs. He 


76 


siqna: 


was brave in a sby, silent way, and be believed that the angels 
were very near, and would help him some day ; still Nita’s 
weighty arm, and the force of her alder twigs or her ash stem, 
were not things to be got rid of by dreaming, and the angels 
were very slow to come ; no doubt because he was not good 
enough, as Signa thought sorrowfully. And he had sent them 
farther away from him than ever by that unjust act about the 
currants ; so that his heart throbbed fast as he climbed the 
rickety stairs where the spiders had it all their own way, and 
the old scorpions never were frightened by a broom, which 
made them very happy, because scorpions hate a broom, and 
tumble down dead at the sight of one (cleanliness having im- 
measurable power over them) in as moral an allegory as ^sop 
and Fontaine could ever have wished to draw. 

Nita and all her noisy brood were standing together over 
the table, with a big loaf on it, and an empty bowl, and flasks 
of oil and vinegar, getting ready for supper. 

Lippo was down in the street, playing dominoes, and old 
Baldo was sitting below, puzzling out, by a bronze lamp, from 
a book of dreams, some signs he had had visions of in a doze, 
to see their numbers for the tombola. 

“ How late you are, you little plague I I gave you till sun- 
set,” screamed Nita, as she saw him. “And where is the 
salad ? Give me — quick I” 

“ I am very sorry,” stammered Signa, timidly. “ The salad ? 
I forgot it. I am very sorry !” 

“ Sorry ; and I waiting all this time for supper !” shrieked 
Nita. “ Nothing to do but just to cut a lettuce and some 
endive off the ground, and you forget it. Where have you 
been all day?” 

“ With Bruno.” 

“ With Bruno — of course with Bruno — and could not bring 
a salad olF his land. The only thing you had to think of, and 
we waiting for supper, and the sun over the mountains more 
than an hour ago, and you stufied up there, I warrant, like a 
fatting goose !” 

“ I had some bread and milk,” said Signa. 

He was trembling in all his little limbs ; he could not help 
this, they beat him so often, and he knew well what was 
coming. 

“And nothing else?” screamed Nita, for every good thing 


SIGNA. 


77 


that went to him she considered robbery and violence done on 
her own children. 

“ I had fruit ; but I took it to Sandro’s girls,” said Signa, 
very low, because he was such a foolish little fellow that 
neither example, nor execration, nor constant influence of 
lying could ever make him untruthful, and a child is always 
either utterly untruthful or most exaggerately exact in truth 
— there is no medium for him. 

“ To Sandro’s girls ! — and not to us I” screeched Nita’s eldest 
daughter, and boxed him on the ear. 

“You little beast !” said Giorgio, the biggest boy, and 
kicked him. 

Toto, waiting for the signal of assault, sprang on him like 
a cat, and pulled his hair till he tore some curls out by the 
roots. 

Signa was very pale, but he never made sound or effort. 
He stood stock-still and mute, and bore it. He had seen pic- 
tures of St. Stephen and St. Lawrence and of Christ, — and 
they were still and quiet always, letting their enemies have 
their way. Perhaps, if he was still too, he thought, it might 
be forgiven to him, that sin about the currants. 

Nita, with an iron hand, sent her offspring off reeling to 
their places, and seized him herself and stripped him. 

He was all bruised from the night’s beating still ; but she 
did not pause for that. She plucked down her rod of alder 
twigs, and thrashed him till he bled again, then threw him into 
the straw in the inner room beyond, where the boys slept. 

All the time he was quite mute. Shut up in the dark his 
courage gave way under the pain, and he burst out crying. 

“ Dear angels, do not be angry with me any more,” he 
prayed, “ and I only did it to make Gemma happy ; and they 
beat me so here ; and I never tell Bruno.” 

But the angels, wherever they are, never now come this 
side of the sun, and Signa lay all alone in the dark, and got 
no rest nor answer. 

“ The chitarra will be sorry,” he thought, getting tired of 
waiting for the angels.* 

He told all his sorrows and joys to the chitarra, and he was 
sure it understood, for did it not sing with him, or sigh with 
him, just as his heart taught it? 

“ I will tell the chitarra,” said Signa, sobbing in his straw, 
7 * 


78 


SIGNA. 


with a vague babyish dim sense of the great truth that his 
art is the only likeness of an angel that the singer ever sees 
on earth. 


CHAPTER X. 

The little fellow had a laborious life at the best of times, 
but he had so grown up in it that it never occurred to him to 
repine. 

True, Toto, the same age as himself, and a mother’s darling, 
led one just as lazy and agreeable as his was hard and over- 
worked. Toto sported in the sun at pleasure, played mora for 
halfpence, robbed cherry-trees, slept through noon, devoured 
fried beans and green almonds and artichokes in oil, and re- 
fused to be of any earthly use to any human creature through 
all his dirty idle days as best beseemed to him. But Signa 
from the cradle up had been taught to give way to Toto, and 
been taught to know that the measure of life for Toto was 
golden and for him was lead. It had always been so from the 
first, when Nita had laid him hungry in the hay to turn to 
Toto full but screaming. 

Signa, sent out in the dark before the sun rose, to see to the 
sheep on the hill, kept on the hill winter and summer, if he 
were not sent higher to fetch things from Bruno’s garden and 
fields ; running on a dozen errands a^day for Baldo or Lippo 
or Nita ; trotting by the donkey’s side with vegetables along 
the seven dusty miles into the city, and trotting back again 
afoot, because the donkey was laden with charcoal, or linen to 
be washed, or some other town burden that Lippo earned a 
penny by, fetching in for his neighbors ; early and late, in 
heat and in cold, when the south wind scorched, as when the 
north wind howled, Signa was always on his feet, doing this 
and that and the other. But he had got quite used to it, and 
thought it a wonderful treat that they allowed him to sing now 
and then for the priests, and that he let his voice loose as loud 
as he liked on the hill-sides and in the fields. 

When he went up into these fields, and knew the beautiful 
Tuscan world in summer, the liberty and loveliness of it made 


SIGNA. 


79 


him happy without his knowing why, because the poetic temper 
was alive in him. 

The little breadths of grass-land white as snow with a million 
cups of the earth-creeping bind-weed. The yellow wheat clam- 
bering the hill-sides and darkened to ruddy bronze when the 
vine-shadows fell over it. The midsummer glory of the trees with 
their blush flowers tossing among the great walnuts and the cone- 
dropping furs. The flg-trees and the apple-trees flinging their 
boughs together in June like children clasping arms in play. 
The glow-worm lying under the moss, while the fire-flies shone 
aloft in the leaves. The blue butterflies astir like living corn- 
flowers among the bearded barley and the dainty grace of the 
oats. The little shallow brooks sleeping in sun and shade un- 
der the green canes, with the droll frogs talking of the weather. 
The cistus, that looks so like the dog-rose, that you pluck one 
for the other every day, covering the rough loose stones and 
crumbling walls with beauty so delicate you fear to breathe on 
it. The long turf paths between the vines, left for the bul- 
locks to pass by in vintage-time, and filled with amethystine 
colors from clover and ivis and bugloss and fritillaria. The way- 
side crucifixes so hidden in coils of vine and growing stalks of 
rush-like millet and the swaying fronds of acacia ofishoots 
that you scarce can see the cross for the foliage. The high 
hills that seem to sleep against the sun, so still they look, and 
dim and dreamful, with clouds of olives, soft as mist, and flecks 
of white where the mountain villages are, distant as far-oAT 
sails of ships, and full, like them, of vague fancy and hope and 
perils of the past. All these things were beautiful to him, and 
he was very happy when he went up to Bruno. 

Besides, this tall dark fellow, who scowled on every one and 
should have been a brigand, people said, was always good to 
him. 

He had to work, indeed, for Bruno, to carry the cabbages 
into the town, to pump the water from the tanks, to pick the 
insects off the vines, to cut the distaff-canes, to carry the cow 
her fresh fodder, to do all the many things that are always 
wanting to be done from dawn to eve on a little farm. But 
then Bruno always spared him half an hour for his lute, al- 
ways gave him a good meal, always let him enjoy himself 
when he could, and constantly interceded to get him spared 
labor on a feast-day, and leave to attend the communal school. 


80 


SJGNA. 


He did not wonder either at Bruno’s kindness or at the 
other’s unkindness ; because children take good and evil as the 
birds take rain and sunshine. But it lightened the troubles 
of his young life and made them bearable. 

He had never wandered farther than the hills above the 
town, and sometimes he was sent with the donkey into Flor- 
ence ; that was all. But the war-worn stanch old Lastra is 
enough world for a child ; it would be too wide a one for an 
historian, could all its stones have tongues. 

It is a trite saying that it is not what we see but how we see 
that matters ; and Signa saw in his battle-dinted world-forsaken 
village more things and more meanings than a million grown- 
up wanderers would have seen in the width of many countries. 

He got the old men to tell him stories of it in the great re- 
publican centuries ; the stories were apocryphal, no doubt, but 
had that fitness which almost does as well as truth in popular 
traditions, and, indeed, is truth in a measure. He knew how 
to read, and in old muniment rooms going to decay in farm- 
houses and granaries found tattered chronicles which he could 
spell out with more or less success. He knew all the old tow- 
ers and ruined fortresses as the owls knew them. When he 
got a little time to himself, which was not very often, he would 
wander away up into the high hills and play his lute to the 
sunny silence, and fancy himself a minstrel like those he saw 
in the illuminations of the vellum rolls that the rats ate in 
many a villa once a palace and now a wine-warehouse, whose 
lords had died out root and branch. Wading knee-deep in the 
green river-water among the canes and the croaking frogs that 
the other boys were fishing for, his shining eyes saw the broad 
channel of the river filled with struggling horses and fighting 
men, as they told him it had been in the old days when Cas- 
truccio had forded it and Ferruccio had ridden over it with his 
lances. 

It was all odds and ends and waifs and strays of most im- 
perfect knowledge that he got, for every one was ignorant 
around him, and though the people were proud of their his- 
tory, they so mixed it up with grotesque invention and dis- 
torted hyperbole that it was almost worthless. Still, the little 
that he knew made the old town beautiful to him and vener- 
able and most wonderful, as Troy, if he could see it entire, 
would seem to a Hellenic scholar. His little head was full of 


SJGNA. 


81 


delicate and glorious fancies, as he pattered on his bare brown 
feet beside the donkey under the gateways of the Lastra ; — 
the west one with its circlet of azure where the monochrome 
used to be, and its chasm of green where the ivy and bushes 
grow ; and the east one with its great stone shields, and its 
yawning depth of arch, and its warders’ turrets on the roof 
He was so absorbed in thinking that he would sometimes never 
see the turnips jump out of the panniers, or the chestnuts shake 
out of the sacks on the donkey’s back, and Nita would beat 
him till he was blue for leaving them rolling in the Lastra 
streets, — to be puzzling about old color on the tops of gates, 
when the blessed vegetables were flying loose like mad things 
on the stones ! — it was enough to call down the instant judg- 
ment of Heaven, she averred. 

Those gleams of blue on the battlements, what use were 
they ? and as for the clouds — they were always holding off 
when they were wanted, and coming down when rain was ruin. 
But as for turnips and beans — about their preciousness there 
could be no manner of doubt. And she taught the priority 
of the claims of the soup-pot with a thick cudgel, as the world 
teaches it to the poet. The poet often learns the lesson, and 
puts his conscience in to stew, as if it were an onion ; finding 
philosophy will bake no bread. 

But no beating could cure Signa of looking at the frescoes, 
and hearing the angels singing in the clouds above. 

Signa was not as other children were. To Nita he seemed 
more foolish and more worthless than any of them, and she 
despised him. 

“ You cannot beat the gates down nor the clouds,” said 
Signa, when she thrashed him ; and that comforted him. But 
such an answer seemed to Nita the very pertinacy of the 
Evil One himself 

“ He was an obstinate little beast,” said Nita, “ and if it 
were not for that half of Bruno’s land ” 

But he was not obstinate. He only stretched towards the 
light he saw, as the plant in the cellar will stretch through the 
bars. 

Tens of millions of little peasants come to the birth, and 
grow up and become men, and do the daily bidding of the 
world, and work and die, and have no more of soul or God- 
head in them than the grains of sand. But here and there, 

D* 


82 


SIQNA. 


with no lot different from his fellows, one is born to dream and 
muse and struggle to the sun of higher desires, and the world 
calls such a one Burns, or Haydn, or Giotto, or Shakspeare, 
or whatever name the fierce light of fame may burn upon and 
make iridescent. 

Some other relaxations and enjoyments too the child found ; 
and here and there people were good to him ; women for the 
sake of his pretty innocent face, with the cloud of dusky gold 
of hair half over it always, and priests for the sake of his 
voice, which gave such beauty to their services when anything 
great happened to demand a full ceremonial in their dark, 
quiet, frescoed sanctuaries scattered under the hills and on 
them. Indeed, Lippo would have taken him into the city, 
and made money of his singing in the great churches at Easter 
time, or on Ascension Bay, or in Holy Week at the grand 
ceremonies of Rome. But of that Bruno would never hear. 
He set his heel down on the ground with an oath. 

“ Sell your soul, if you please, and the devil is fool enough 
to pay for it,” he said, “ but you shall never sell the throat of 
Pippa’s child like any trapped nightingale’s.” 

Poor Lippo sighed and yielded ; it was one of those things 
in which his own good sense and calm wisdom had to let them- 
selves be overborne by his brother’s impetuous unreason. The 
churches — even the great ones — pay but a few pence ; it was 
not worth while risking for a few coppers, or an uncertain 
future, that lucrative “ half of my half” off the rich fields and 
vine-paths of the Artimino mountain. 

So Signa sang here and there, a few times in the year, in 
the little choirs about the Lastra, for nothing at all but the love 
of it, and in the Holy Week sang in the church of the Mis- 
ericordia, where one of his chief haunts and sweetest pleasures 
was found at all times. 

It is the only church within the Lastra walls, the parish 
church being outside upon the hills, and very little used. It 
is a small place, gray and grim of exterior, with its red curtain 
hanging down much worn, and having, within, its altar-piece 
by Cimabue, only shown on high and holy feasts ; no religious 
building in this country, however lowly, is quite without some 
treasure of the kind. 

The little edifice fills to overflowing at high mass, and the 
people stand on the steps and in the street, and the sound of 


SIONA. 


83 


the chanting and the smoke of the incense and the tinkle of 
the little bells come out on to the air over the bowed heads, 
and with them there mingle all sweet common country sounds, 
from bleating sheep, and rushing winds, and watch-dogs bay- 
ing afar off, and heaving ropes grating boats against the bridge ; 
and the people murmur their prayers in the sun and bow and 
kneel and go home comforted, if they know not very well why 
they are so. 

Above the body of the church, led up to by a wooden stair- 
case, there are the rooms of the Fraternity to which all good 
men and true belong for the love of the poor and the service 
of heaven, — rooms divided into little cells, each with the black 
robes and mask of a brother of the order in it ; and black- 
lettered lines of Scripture above, and the cross-bones of death ; 
and closets where the embroidered banners are, and the 
sacred things for holy offices, and the black velvet pall with its 
memento mori and its golden skulls, that covers each brother 
on his last travel to his latest rest. 

Here, in the stillness and the silence, with these symbols of 
death everywhere around, there dwelt at this time in the dull 
songless church a man who, in his day, had been a careless 
wandering singer, loving his art honestly, though himself one 
of the lowliest of her servitors. 

Born in the Lastra, with a sweet voice and an untrained love 
of harmony, his tastes had led him to wander away from it 
and join one of the troops of musicians who make the chance 
companies in the many small theatres that are to be found in 
the Italian towns which lie out of the great highways, and are 
hardly known by name, except in their own commune. He had 
never risen high in his profession, though a favorite in the 
little cities, but had always wandered about from season to 
season, from playhouse to playhouse ; and in the middle way 
of his career a drenching in a rain-storm, after a burning day, 
had made his throat mute and closed his singing life forever. 

He had returned to his birthplace, and there joining the 
Misericordia, had become organist and sacristan to their church 
in the Lastra, and had stayed in those offices some thirty years, 
and now was over seventy ; a silent, timid old creature usually, 
but of a gentle temper, and liking nothing better than to recall 
the days of his wanderings as a singer, or to linger over the keys 
of his old organ with some world-forgotten score before him. 


84 


SIGN A. 


There was little scope for his fondness for melody in the 
Lastra. It was only in Holy Week that he could arrange any 
choral service ; or once in two or three years, perhaps, there 
would come such a chance for him as he had had on that tiay 
of Corpus Domini when the bishop’s visit had brought about 
an unusual greatness of ceremonial. 

At all other times all he could ever do was to play a few 
symphonies or fugues at high mass, and if any village child 
had a great turn for melody, teach it the little science that he 
knew, as he taught Signa, — who was so docile a pupil that he 
would have knelt in happy obedience to the whip which St. 
Gregory bought for his scholars, only he never would have 
merited it for the transgression of singing out of time. 

The stillness, the sadness, the seclusion, where no sound 
came unless it were some tolling bell upon the hills, the mel- 
ancholy associations of the place, which all spoke of pain, of 
effort, of sorrow, of the needs of the poor, and of the warn- 
ings of the grave, all these fostered the dreamful temper of the 
boy, and the thoughtfulness which was beyond his years, and 
he passed many a happy tranquil hour singing over to him- 
self, or trying to reproduce upon his lute, as best he might, 
themes of the musicians of earlier generations — from the 
fugues of Merula — from the airs of Zingarelli — ^from the 
Stabat Mater of Jedi — from the Benedictus of Jomelli — ^from 
the Credo of Perez — from the Cantata of Porpora — knowing 
nothing of their names or value, but finding out their melo- 
dies and meanings by sheer instinct. 

Luigi Dini, whom every one called Gigi, had many a crabbed 
old score and fine sonata and cantata copied out by his own 
hands, and the child, having been taught his notes, had grown 
able to find his way in this labyrinth, and pick out beautiful 
things from the dust of ages by ear and instinct, and make them 
all his own, as love appropriates whatever it worships ; and he 
never knew, as he went over the stones of the Lastra with the 
donkey, and woke the people in their beds with his clear voice, 
whilst all was dark and only he and the birds were astir, that 
when he was singing the great Se circa, ce disce, or the mighty 
Misero pargoletto, or the delicious Quelli-ld, or the tender 
Deh signora! he was giving out to the silent street, and the 
driving echoes, and the wakening flush of day, airs that had 
been the rapture of the listening world a century before. 


SIGN A. 


85 


Grave Gregorian melodies ; Laudi of the Florentine laudisti 
of the Middle Ages ; hymns from the monasteries, modeled on 
the old Greek traditions, with “ the note the slave of the word 
all things simple, pure, and old filled the manuscripts of the 
sacristy like antique jewels. Signa, very little, very ignorant, 
very helpless, strayed among them confused and unconscious 
of the value of the things he played with ; and yet got the good 
out of them and felt their richness and was nourished on the 
strength of them, and ran away to them at every stolen mo- 
ment that he could, while Luigi Dini stood by and listened, 
and was moved at the wonderful instinct of the child, as the 
Romans were moved at the young Mozart’s singing of the 
Allegri requiem. 

Music was in the heart and the brain of the child ; his feet 
moved to it over the dusty roads, his heavy burdens were light- 
ened by it, and when they scolded him, often he did not hear 
— there w^ere so many voices singing to him. 

Where did the voices come from ? He did not know ; only 
he heard them when he lay awake in the straw beside the other 
boys, with the stars shining through the unglazcd windows of 
the roof ; as he heard them when the hot noon was bright and 
still on the hill-top where he strayed all alone with his sheep. 

One day he found the magical voices shut up in a little 
browm prison of wood, as a great soul ere now has been pent 
in a mean little body, — one day, a wonderful day, after which 
all the world changed for him. 

In a little shop in the Lastra by the Porta Fiorentino there 
■was a violin for sale, — a violin in pear-wood, with a shell inlaid 
upon its case, and reputed to be very, very old. 

Tonino, the locksmith and tinman, had it. So many years 
before that he could not count them, a lodger had left it with 
him in default of rent, and never had gone back for it. The 
violin lay neglected in the dust of an old cupboard. One day 
a peddler had spied it and olfered ten francs for it. Tonino 
said to himself, if a peddler would give that, it must be worth 
four times the sum at least, and put it in his window with his 
old keys and his new saucepans, and his ancient locks and his 
spick-and-span bright coffee-pots, — a little old dusky window 
just within the tall east gateway of the Lastra, where the 
great poplars throw their welcome shadow across the sunny 
road. 


8 


86 


SIGNA. 


Signa going on an errand there one day and left alone in 
the shop took it up and began to make the strings sound, not 
knowing how, but finding the music out for himself, as Pascal 
found the science of mathematics, and Wiertz the art of 
engraving. 

When Tonino entered his workshop, with a pair of hot 
pincers in his hand, he was frightened to death to hear the 
sweetest sounds dancing about the air like butterflies, and 
when he discovered that the child was playing on his precious 
violin that the peddler would have given ten francs for, he 
hardly knew whether to kiss the child for being so clever or 
whether to pinch him with the red-hot nippers for his 
impudence. Anyhow, he snatched the violin from him and 
put it in the window again. 

A thing that could make so sweet a noise must be worth 
double what he thought. 

So he put a price of forty francs upon it, and stuck it among 
his tins, hoping to sell it: dealers or gentlefolks came some- 
times up and down the Lastra, seeing if there were any pretty 
or ancient thing to buy, for the people have beautiful old 
work very often in lace, in majolica, in carvings, in missals, in 
repouss^j in copper, and can be cheated out of these with an 
ease that quite endears them to those who do it. 

A few people looked at Tonino’s violin, but no one bought 
it ; because the right people did not see it, or because it was 
an old violin without any special grace of Cremona or value 
of Bologna on its case. As it lay there in the window among 
the rusty iron and the shining tin things, with the dust drift- 
ing over it, and the flies buzzing about its strings, Signa saw 
it twenty times a week, and sighed his little soul out for it ! 

Oh, the unutterable wonder locked up in that pear-wood 
case ! oh, the deep undreamed-of joys that lay in those mute 
strings ! 

The child thought of nothing else. After those murmurs 
of marvelous meanings that had come to him when touching 
that strange thing, he dreamed of it by day and night. The 
lute was dear to him ; but what was the power of the lute 
beside those heights and depths of sound that this unknown 
creature could give ? — for a living creature it was to him, as 
much as was the redbreast or thrush. 

Only to touch it again ! just once to touch it again ! 


SIQNA. 


87 


He be^sjed and prayed Tonino ; but the tinman was inex- 
orable. He could not risk his bit of property in such babyish 
hands. True, the child had made the music jump out of it; 
but that might have been an accident, and who could tell that 
another time he would not break it, — a little beggar’s brat like 
that, without people to pay for it if any damage were done ? 

“ Give me my forty francs, and you shall have it, picci- 
nino,” Tonino would say, with a grin, knowing that he might 
as well tell the child to bring him down the star-dust from 
the skies. 

Signa would go away with his little head hung down, the 
longing for the violin possessing him with a one idea — a passion. 
In the young child with whom genius is born its vague tumul- 
tuous desires work without his knowing what it is that ails 
him. 

The children laughed at him, the old people scolded him, 
Nita beat him, Bruno even grew impatient with him because 
he was always sighing for an old fiddle, that it was as absurd 
for him to dream of as if it were a king’s sword or a queen’s 
pearls. 

“ As if he were not lazy and tiresome enough as it is !” 
said Nita, boxing his ears soundly, when she went by one 
evening and caught him leaning against Tonino’s casement, 
and looking with longing, pitiful, ardent eyes at the treasure 
in its pear-wood shell. 

After a time the child, shy and proud in temper, grew 
ashamed of his own enthusiasm, and hid it from the others, 
and never any more tried to soften Tonino’s heart and get 
leave to touch that magical bow again. 

Bruno thought he had forgotten it, and was glad. The 
violin lay with the metal pots and the rusty locks, and no one 
bought it. Signa when he had to go past on an errand 
through the gate to Castagnolo, or Santa Maria del Greve, 
or any other eastward village, tried not to look at the brown 
shining wood that the wasps and the .mosquitoes were hum- 
ming over at their will. But he longed for it the more be- 
cause he kept the longing silent and had no chance of ever 
feeling those keys of enchantment under his little fingers. A 
thing repressed grows. 

He would lie awake at night thinking of the violin ; if it 
had not been so wicked he would have stolen something to 


88 


SIGN A. 


buy it with ; some days it was all he could do to keep himself 
from stealing it itself. 

One bright afternoon in especial, when every one was at a 
marionnette show in the square, and he had come back very 
foot-sore from the city, and passing saw Tonino’s place was 
empty and the old lattice window was open and the sun’s rays 
fell across the violin, it would have been the work of a second 
to put his hand in, and draw it out, and run off — anywhere — 
anywhere — what would it have mattered where, if only he 
had carried all that music with him ? 

For genius is fanaticism ; and the little barefoot hungry 
fellow, running errands in the dust, had genius in him, an 1 
was tossed about by it like a small moth by a storm. 

To run away and wander with the violin to talk to him 
wherever he might go the longing to do this tortured him 
so that he clasped his hands over his eyes and fled — without 
it — as fast as his feet could take him. 

To see it lying dumb, when at a touch it would say such 
beautiful things to him ! — he ran on through the gateway and 
down the road with the burning temptation pursuing him as 
prairie flames a frightened fawn. 

If any one had had it who could have made it speak, he 
would not have minded ; but that it should lie mute there — 
useless — lost — hurt him with a sharper pain than Nita’s hazel 
rods could deal. 

“ Oh, Gemma — almost I stole it !” he gasped, panting and 
breathless with the horror of himself, as he stumbled up 
against the pretty child on the green strip that runs under 
the old south wall, where the breaches made by the Spanish 
assaults are filled in with ivy, and the ropemakers walk to and 
fro, weaving their strands under the ruined bastions. 

Gemma put her finger in her mouth and looked at him. 

“Why not quite?” she said. Gemma had stolen many 
things in her day, and had always been forgiven because she 
was so pretty. 

“ Oh, Gemma, I did — so nearly !” he murmured, unheed- 
ing her answer in the confusion of his own new stricken sense 
of peril and escape. 

“ Was it to eat?” said Gemma. 

“To eat?” 

He echoed her words without knowing what he said. Two 


SIGN A. 


89 


great tears were rolling down his cheeks. He was so grateful 
that strength for resistance had been given him ; and yet he 
was thinking of a song* of the country to a lute, which 
sings of how its owner would gild its strings and wander with 
it even as far as Rome, — mountains and rocks inclining before 
its silver sounds. 

If only he could have that beautiful strange thing, he 
thought, how he would roam the world over, fearing nothing, 
or how happy he would lie down among the sheep and the 
pines, forever making music to the winds. 

“ Why did you not take it, if nobody was by to see ?” said 
Gemma. 

Oh, dear, it is wicked to thieve,” said Signa, drearily, — 
“ wicked, you know, and mean.” 

Gemma put out her lower lip. 

“ If no one knows, it is all right,” she said, with accurate 
perception of the world’s standard of virtue. 

Signa sighed heavily, his head hung down ; he hardly heard 
her ; he was thinking of the violin. 

“ You are a mammamia,” said Gemma, with calm scorn, 
meaning he was a baby and very silly. “ When I wish to do 
a thing, I do it.” 

“ But you do very wrong things sometimes.” 

Gemma shrugged her little white shoulders up to her ears. 

“ It is nice to do wrong,” she said, placidly. 

They sai/ things are wrong, you know,” she added, after 
a pause. “But that is only to keep us quiet. It is all 
words.” 

They called her stupid, but she noticed many facts and 
drew many conclusions. This was one of them ; and it was 
alike agreeable to her and useful. She was a naughty child^ 
but was naughty with logic and success. 

“ If only he would let me touch it once,” murmured 
Signa. 


* ‘‘ Oh quanto suoni bene chitarezza ! 

Le tui corde si possone indorare ! 

Lo mancio diventi una fanciulla ! 

E dove io vada ti posso menare 

Ch’ io ti posso menar da qui a Roma 

E monti e sassi t ’abbeanio a inchinare !” 

Tuscan Seuenade. 


8 * 


90 


SIGN A. 


Gemma, finding him such bad company, went away hop- 
ping on one foot and wondering why boys were such silly 
creatures. 

“ What is the matter ?” said one of the ropemakers kindly 
to the boy. “ Do you want to see the puppet>show that came 
in this morning ? Here is a copper bit if you do.’ 

Signa put his hands behind his back. 

“ Oh, no, it is not that. You are very good, but it is not 
that.” 

“ Take what you can get another time,” said the ropemaker, 
offended, and yet glad that his too generous offer had been 
repulsed by him. 

“ What an ass you are ! The puppets are splendid,” hissed 
Toto, who was near, and who had spent an hour in the fore- 
noon, squeezed between the tent-pegs of the forbidden para- 
dise, flat on his stomach, swallowing the dust. “ They are 
half an arm’s length high, and there are three kings in it, and 
they murder one another just like life — so beautiful ! You 
might have taken the money, surely, and given it to me. I 
shall tell mother; see then if you get any fritters for a 
week !” 

“ I did not want to see the puppets,” said Signa, wearily, 
and walked away. 

It was late in the day ; he had worked hard running into 
the city and back on an errand ; he was tired and listless and 
unhappy. 

As he went, thinking of the violin, by the walls, not noticing 
where his steps took him, he passed a little group of strangers. 
They were travelers who had wandered out there for the day. 
One of them was reading in a book, and looked up as the 
child passed. 

“ What a pity the Lastra is forgotten by the world !” the 
reader said to his companions : he was thinking of the many 
memories which the old castello shuts within her walls as 
manuscripts are shut in coffers. 

Signa heard, and flushed with pain up to the curls of his 
flying hair. 

He said nothing, for he was shy, and, besides, was never 
very sure that people would not take him to Nita for a thrash- 
ing; they so often did. But he went on his way with a 
swelling heart. It hurt him like a blow. To others it was 


SIGNA. 


91 


only a small, ancient, desolate place filled with poor people, 
but to him it was as Zion to the Hebrew children. 

“ If I could be very great, if I could write beautiful things 
as Pergolesi did, and all the world heard them and treasured 
them, then praising me, they would remember the Lastra,” he 
thought. 

A dim, sweet, impossible ambition entered into him, for the 
first time ; the ambition of a child, gorgeous and vague, and 
out of all realms of likelihood ; visions all full of gold and 
color, with no perspective or reality about them, like a picture 
of the twelfth century, in which he saw himself, a man grown, 
laurel-crowned and white-robed, brought into the Lastra, as 
the old sacristan told him Petrarca was taken into Rome ; with 
the rays of the sun of his fame gilding its ancient ways, whilst 
all Italy chanted his melodies and all the earth echoed his 
name. 

“ If I could but be what Pergolesi was !” he thought. 

Pergolesi who consumed his soul in prisons, and died of a 
broken heart. 

But then he knew nothing of that ; he only knew that Per- 
golesi was a great dead creature, whose name was written on 
the scores of the Stabat and the Salve Regina which he loved as 
he loved the roll of thunder and the rose of sunrise ; and he 
knew that it was he who had written that “ Se circa se disce,” 
which he had learned in the dusky organ-loft of the Miseri- 
.cordia; that song in which the great poet and the great musi- 
cian together poured forth the passion of a divine despair, the 
passion which, in its deepest woe and highest pain, thinks but 
of saving the creature that it suffers for : 

^‘Ah no ! si gran duole 
Non darle per me!” 

He did not know anything about him, but looked up at the 
sun, which was sinking downward faintly in the dreamy 
warmth of the pale-green west, and wondered where Pergolesi 
was, beyond those realms of light, those beams of glory? 

Was he chanting the Salve Regina there? 

Between him and the radiance of the setting sun stood the 
little figure of Gemma, her hair all aflame with the light, — 
hair like Titian’s Magdalen and Slave and Venus, like the 
hair that Bronzino has given to the Angel who brings the 


92 


SIGNA. 


tidings of the Annunciation, carrying the spray of lilies in 
his hand. 

“ Oh, you mammamia !” she cried, in derision, stopping 
short, with her brown little sister bowed down beside her 
under the weight of some earthen pots that they had been 
sent to buy in the Lastra. 

“ Oh, you mammamia !” cried Oemma, munching a big pear 
that some one had given her in the Lastra for the sake of her 
pretty little round face with its angelic eyes. 

Signa took Palma’s flower-pots on his own back, and smiled 
back at Gemma. 

“ I have nothing to do before bedtime,” he said ; “ I will 
carry these up for you.” • 

“ And then we can play in the garden,” said Gemma, jump- 
ing olf her rosy feet as she flnished the pear. “ But what w^ere 
you thinking of, staring at the clouds?” 

“ Of a dead man that was a very great man, dear, I think, 
and made beautiful music.” 

“ Only that !” said Gemma, with a pout of her pretty lips, 
throwing away her pear-stalk. 

“ Tell me about him,” said Palma. 

“ I do not know anything,” said Signa sadly. “ He has 
left half his soul in the music, and the other half must be — 
there.” 

He looked up again into the west. 

The two little girls walked along in the dust, one on each 
side of him : Palma wished he would not think so of dead 
people ; Gemma was pondering on the veiled glories of the 
puppets, of whose exploits Toto had told her marvels. 

“Oh, Signa! if we could only see the hurattmi!" she 
murmured, as they trotted onward ; she had been sighing her 
heart out before the tent. 

The hurattini ssiid Signa. “Yes. Gian Lambrochini 
would have given me the money to go ; but I would as soon 
hear the geese hiss or the frogs croak.” 

“You might have gone in — really in? — and seen them, 
murders and all?” said Gemma, with wide-opened eyes of 
amazement. 

“Yes.”' 

“ Money to go-in ! — to go in ! — And you did not take th^ 
money even 1” 


SIGNA. 


93 


“ No ; I did not wish to go.” 

“ But you might have given it to me ! I might have 
gone !” 

The enormity of her loss and of his folly overcame her. 
She stood in the road and stared blankly at him. 

“ That would not have been fair to the Lambrochini,” said 
Palma, who was a sturdy little maiden as to right and wrong. 

“ No, — and he so poor himself, and so old !” said Signa. 
“ It would not have been fair, Gremma.” 

“ If you were fond of me, would you think of what was 
‘fair’ ? You would think of amusing me. It is a shame of 
you, Signa, — a burning shame ! And longing to see those 
puppets as I have done, — crying my eyes out before the tent ! 
It is wicked.” 

“ Dear, I am sorry,” murmured Signa. “ But, indeed, in- 
deed, I never thought of you.” 

“ And never thought of all you might have got with the 
money 1” 

Gemma twisted herself on one side, putting up her plump 
little shoulders, sullenly, into her ears, with a scowl on her 
face. 

It cost a whole coin — ten centimes — to go in to even the 
cheapest standing-places in the theatre, and for a whole coin 
you could get a big round sweet cake for five centimes, and 
for another centime a handful of melon-seeds, and for another 
a bit of chocolate, and for another two figs, and for the fourth 
and fifth a painted saint in sugar. And he might have brought 
all those treasures to her ! 

Gemma, between her two companions, felt the immeasurable 
disdain of the practical intelligence for the idle dreamer and 
the hypercritical moralist. She trotted on in the dust sulkily, 
— a little rosy and auburn figure in the shadows, as if she 
were a Botticelli cherub put into life and motion. 

“ You are cross, dear !” said Signa, with a sigh, putting his 
hand round her throat to caress her back into content. But 
Gemma shook him off, and trotted on alone in outraged dignity. 

They climbed the steep ascent of grassy and broken ground, 
past the parish church, with the deserted convent above 
among its cypresses, and the wilder hills with their low wood- 
land growth green and dark and fresh against the south, and 
then entered the great gardens of Giovoli, where Sandro Za- 


94 


SIGN A. 


nobetti worked all the years of his life among the lemons and 
magnolia-trees. 

The villa was uninhabited ; but the gardens were cultivated 
by its owner, and the flowers and fruits were sent into the city 
market, and in the winter down to Rome. 

‘•Are you cross still, G-emma?” said Signa, when he had 
put the big pots down in the tool-house. Gemma glanced at 
him with her fore-finger in her mouth. 

“Will you play? What shall we play at?” said Signa, 
coaxingly. “ Come ! It shall be anything you like to choose. 
Palma does not mind.” 

Gemma took her finger out of her mouth and pointed to 
some apricots golden and round against the high wall opposite 
them. 

“ Get me four big ones and I will play.” 

“ Oh, Gemma !” cried Palma, piteously. “ Those are the 
very best, the very ones for the padrone !” 

“ I know,” said Gemma. 

“ But the fattore counted them this very morning, and 
knows every one there is, and will blame father if one be gone, 
and father will beat Signa or make Nita beat him !” 

“ Besides, it is stealing. Gemma,” said Signa. 

“ Che !” said little Gemma, with unmeasured scorn. “ You 
can climb there, Signa?” 

“ Yes, I can climb ; but you do not wish me to do wrong to 
please you, dear?” 

“ Yes, I do,” said Gemma. 

“ Oh, Gemma, then I cannot !” murmured Signa, sadly. 
“If it were only myself! — but it is wrong, dear, and your 
father would be blamed. Palma is right.” 

“ Che 1” said Gemma, again, with her little red mouth thrust 
out. “ Will you go and get them, Signa?” 

“No,” said Signa. 

“ Tista I” cried Gemma, with her sweetest little chirp, and 
flew through the twilight fragrance. “ Tista 1 Tista ! Tista 1” 

Tista was Giovanni Battista, the twelve-year-old son of a 
fellow-laborer of Zanobetti, who lived on the other side of the 
wall, — a big brown boy, who was her slave. 

Signa ran after her. 

“ No, no 1 Gemma, come back 1” 

Gemma glanced over her shoulder. 


SIGN A. 


95 


“ Tista will get them, and he will swing me in the big trees 
afterwards.” 

“No! Gremma, listen — come back! Gemma, listen; I 
will get them.” 

Gemma stood still, and laughed. 

“ Get them first, then I will come back ; but Tista will do 
as well as you. And he swings me better. He is bigger.” 

Signa climbed up the wall, bruising his arms and wounding 
his feet, for the stones of it were sharp, and there was hardly 
any foothold ; but with some effort he got the apricots and 
dropped to the ground with them, and ran to Gemma. 

“ Here ! Now you will not go to Tista ? But, oh. Gemma, 
why make me do such a thing ? It is a wrong thing ! — it is 
very wrong !” 

“ I did not make you do anything,” said Gemma, receiving 
the fruit into her skirt. “ I did not make you. I said Tista 
would do as well.” 

Signa was silent. 

She did not even thank him. She did not even offer to 
share the spoils. He was no nearer her good graces than he 
had been before he had sinned to please her. 

“ Oh, Signa ! I never, never would have believed !” mur- 
mured Palma, ready to cry, and powerless to act. 

“ She wished it so. She would have gone to Tista,” said 
Signa, and stood and watched the little child eating the fruit 
with all the pretty pecking ardor of a chaffinch. Gemma 
laughed as she sat down upon the grass to enjoy her stolen 
goods at fuller ease. When she had got her own way, all her 
good humor returned. 

“ What sillies you are !” she said, looking at the tearful eye 
of her sister, and at Signa standing silent in the shade. 

“It is you who are cruel. Gemma,” said Palma, and went, 
with her little black head hung down, into the house, because, 
though she was only ten years old, she was the mistress of it, 
and had to cook and sweep and wash, and hoe the cabbages 
and bake the bread, or else the floors remained filthy and the 
hungry boys shirtless and unfed. 

Gemma did not know that she was cruel. She was any- 
thing that served her purpose best and brought her the most 
pleiisure, — that was all. 

She ate her apricots with the glee of a little mouse eating 


96 


SIGN A, 


a bit of cbeese. Signa watclied her. It was all the recom- 
pense he had. 

He knew that he had been weak, and had done wrong, 
because the fruit-trees were under Sandro’s charge, who had 
no right to any of it, being a man paid by the week, and with- 
out any share in what he helped to cultivate ; and this on the 
south wall being the very choicest of it all, Sandro had 
threatened his children with dire punishment if they should 
dare even to touch what should fall. 

When she had eaten the last one, Gemma jumped up. 
Signa caught her. 

“You will kiss me now, and come and play? There is 
just half an hour.” 

But Gemma twisted herself away, laughing gleefully. 

“ No ; I shall go and swing with Tista.” 

“ Oh, Gemma ! when you promised ” 

“ I never promised,” said Gemma. 

“ You said you would come back.” 

Gemma laughed her merriest at his face of astonished re- 
proach. 

“ I did come back ; but I am going again. Tista swings 
better than you.” 

And, with her little carols of laughter rippling away among 
the leaves, Gemma ran olF and darted through a low door and 
banged it behind her, and called aloud, — 

“ Tista ! Tista ! Come and swing me !” 

In a few moments, on the other side above the wall, her little 
body curled upon the rope, and her sunny head as yellow as a 
marigold, were seen flying in a semicircle up into the boughs 
of the high magnolia-trees, while she laughed on, and called 
louder, — 

“ Higher, higher, Tista ! — higher !” 

Signa could see her, and could hear : that was all the re- 
ward he had. 

He sat down disconsolate by the old broken statue by the 
water-lilies. 

He was too proud to follow her to dispute with Tista. 

“ I will not waste another hour on her, — ever !” he thought, 
with bitterness in his heart. There were the lute and the 
music in the quiet sacristy ; and old fragrant silent hills so 
full of dreams for him ; and Bruno, who loved him and never 


SIGNA. 


97 


cheated him ; and the nightingales that told him a thousand 
stories of their loves among the myrtles ; and the stones of the 
Lastrathat had the tales of the great dead written on them; — 
when he had all these, why should he waste his few spare 
precious minutes on this faithless, saucy, sulky, unsrateful 
little child? 

His heart was very heavy as he heard her laughter. She 
had made him do wrong, and then had mocked at him and 
left him. 

“ I will never think about her, never any more !” he said 
to himself, while the shadows darkened, and the bats flew out, 
and the glow-worms twinkled, and in the dusk he could still 
just see the golden head of Gemma flying in the bronzed 
leaves of the magnolias. 

After a while her laughter and her swinging ceased. 

The charm of perfect silence fell on the grand old garden. 
He sat on, soothed and yet sorrowful. The place was beauti- 
ful to him, even without Gemma. 

In this garden of these children all the flora of Italy was 
gathered and was growing. 

The delights of an Italian garden are countless. It is not 
like any other garden in the world. It is at once more formal 
and more wild, at once greener with more abundant youth and 
venerable with more antique age. It has all Boccaccio between 
its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves, all Raffaelle in its skies. 
And then the sunshine that beggars words and laughs at paint- 
ers! — the boundless, intense, delicious, heavenly light! What 
do other gardens know of that, save orange-groves of Granada 
and rose-thickets of Damascus ? 

The old broken marble statues, whence the water dripped 
and fed the water-lily; the great lemon-trees in pots big 
enough to drown a man, the golden globes among their emer- 
ald leaves ; the magnolias, like trees cast in bronze, with all 
the spice of India in their cups ; the spires of ivory bells that 
the yuccas put forth, like belfries for fairies ; the oleanders 
tidier than a man, red and white and plush color; the broad 
velvet leaves of the flowering rush ; the dark majestic elice 
oaks, that make the noon like twilight ; the countless graces 
of the vast family of acacias ; the high box hedges, sweet and 
pungent in the sun ; the stone ponds, where the gold-fish sleep 
through the sultry day ; the wilderness of carnations ; the huge 
B 9 


98 


SIGN A. 


roses, yellow, crimson, snow-white, and the small noisette and 
the banhsia with its million of pink stars ; myrtles in dense 
thickets, and camellias like a wood of evergreens ; cacti in all 
quaint shapes, like fossils astonished to find themselves again 
alive ; high walls vine-hung and topped by pines and cypresses ; 
low walls with crowds of geraniums on their parapets, and the 
mountains and the fields beyond them ; marble basins hidden 
in creepers, where the frogs dozed all day long ; sounds of con- 
vent bells and of chapel chimes ; green lizards basking on the 
flags; great sheds and granaries beautiful with the clematis 
and the wisteria and the rosy trumpets of the bignonia ; great 
wooden places cool and shady, with vast arched entrances, and 
scent of hay, and empty casks, and red earthen amphorae, and 
little mice scudding on the floors, and a sun-dial painted on 
the wall, and a crucifix set above the weathercock, and through 
the huge unglazed windows sight of the green vines with the 
bullocks in the harvest-carts beneath them, or of some hilly 
sunlit road with a mule-team coming down it, or of a blue 
high hill wdth its pine-trees black against the sky, and on its 
slopes the yellow corn and misty olive. This was their gar- 
den ; it is ten thousand other gardens in the land. 

The old painters had these gardens, and walked in them, 
and thought nothing better could be needed for any scene of 
Annunciation or Adoration, and so put them in beyond the 
windows of Bethlehem or behind the Throne of the Lamb ; 
and wdio can wonder? 

The mighty lives have passed away into silence, leaving no 
likeness to them on earth ; but if you would still hold com- 
munion with them, even better than to go to written score or 
printed book or painted panel or chiseled marble or cloistered 
gloom, is it to stray into one of these old quiet gardens, where 
for hundreds of years the stone naiad has leaned over the foun- 
tain, and the golden lizard hidden under the fallen caryatid, 
and sit quite still, and let the stones tell you "what they re- 
member and the leaves say what the sun once saw ; and then 
the shades of the great dead will come to you. Only you 
must love them truly, else you will see them never. 

8igna, in his little ignorant way, did love them with just 
such blind untaught love as a little bird born in a dark cage 
has for the air and the light. 

When he stole into the deserted villas, where, after centu- 


SIGNA. 


99 


ries of neglect, some fresco would glow still upon the damp 
walls where the cobwebs and the wild vine had their way, — 
when he saw the sculptured cornices and the gilded fretwork 
and the broken mosaic in the halls where cattle were stabled 
and grain piled, — when he knelt down before the dusky name- 
less Madonnas in the little churches on the hills, or found some 
marble head lying among the wild thyme, — the boy’s heart 
moved with a longing and a tenderness to which he could have 
given no title. 

As passion yet unknown thrills in the adolescent, as mater- 
nity yet undreamed of stirs in the maiden, so the love of art 
comes to the artist before he can give a voice to his thought 
or any name to his desire. 

Signa heard “ beautiful things” as he sat in the rising moon- 
light, with the bells of the little bindweed white about his 
feet. 

That was all he could have said. 

Whether the angels sent them on the breeze, or the birds 
brought them, or the dead men came and sang them to him, 
he could not tell. Indeed, who can tell ? 

Where did Guido see the golden hair of St. Michael gleam 
upon the wind ? Where did Mozart hear the awful cries of 
the risen dead come to judgment? What voice was in the 
fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding oxlip did Shak- 
speare find Titania asleep ? When did the Mother of Love 
come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness .than vestal in 
her veil, and with such vision of her make obscure Cleomenes 
immortal ? 

Who can tell ? 

Signa sat dreaming, with his chin upon his hands, and his 
eyes wandering over all the silent place, from the closed flowers 
at his feet to the moon in her circles of mist. 

Who walks in these paths now may go back four hundred 
years. They are changed in nothing. Through their high 
hedges of rhododendron and of jessamine that grow like wood- 
land trees it would still seem but natural to see Raphael with 
his court-train of students, or Signorelli splendid in those ap- 
parelings which were the comment of his age ; and on these 
broad stone terraces with the lizards basking on their steps and 
the trees opening to show a vine-covered hill with the white 
oxen creeping down it and the blue mountains farther still be- 


100 


SIONA. 


hind, it would be but fitting to see a dark figure sitting and 
painting lilies upon a golden ground, or cherubs’ heads upon 
a panel of cypress wood, and to hear that this painter was the 
monk Angelico. 

The deepest charm of these old gardens, as of their country, 
is, after all, that in them it is possible to forget the present 
age. 

In the full, drowsy, voluptuous noon, when they are a gor- 
geous blaze of color and a very intoxication of fragrance, as in 
the ethereal white moonlight of midnight, when, with the 
silver beams and the white blossoms and the pale marbles, they 
are like a world of snow, their charm is one of rest, silence, 
leisure, dreams, and passion all in one ; they belong to the 
days when art was a living power, when love was a thing of 
heaven or of hell, and when men had the faith of children 
and the force of gods. 

Those days are dead, but in these old gardens you can be- 
lieve still that you live in them. 

The boy, who did not know hardly why he was moved by 
it so greatly, musing in this garden of Giovoli, and sitting 
watching the glow-worms in the ground-woodbine, was more 
than half consoled for the cruelty of his playmate. When 
the nine o’clock chimes rang down below in the Lastra, he did 
not move ; he had forgotten that if he were away when Nita 
should shut her house up he would have another beating and 
no supper. 

How often was Giotto scolded for letting the sheep stray ? 

Very often, no doubt. 

When the moon had quite risen, with a ring of mist round 
her, because there was rain hanging in the air, little feet ran 
over the bindweed, and a little rosy face, all the prettier for 
the shadows that played in its eyes and the watery radiance 
that shone in its curls, looked up into his with saucy merri- 
ment. 

A little piping voice ran like a cricket’s chirp into the 
stillness. 

“ You may swing me to-morrow : do you hear?” 

Signa started, roused from his musing. 

The beautiful things were mute : the clouds and the leaves 
told him nothing more. He was only a little barefooted boy, 
vexed at being left alone, and jealous of big brown Tista. 


SIGN A. 


101 


Gemma was a pretty, sulky baby, with a pert tongue and a 
sturdy will of her own ; a little thing that could not read a 
letter, and cared for nothing but for eating and for play ; but 
there were shadowed out in her the twin foes of all genius, — 
the Woman and the World. 

“Are you sulking here?” said Gemma. “ Tista swung me 
so high ! — so high ! Much better than you. You must get 
out of the garden now ; father is come to lock the gates.” 

Signa got up slowly. 

“ Good-night, Gemma.” 

“ Good-night, Gemma !” echoed the child, mimicking the 
sadness of his answer. “ Oh, how stupid you are ! Just like 
Palma ! Tista has more life in him, only he never has any- 
thing for one except those little green apples. You may come 
and swing me to-morrow, if you like.” 

“ No ; you love Tista.” 

“ But I love you best.” 

She whispered it with all the wooing archness and softness 
of twenty years instead of ten, with the moonbeams shining 
in her eyes till they looked like wet cornflowers. 

Signa was silent. He knew she did not love him, but only 
his pears that he got for her from Bruno, or his baked cakes 
that he coaxed for her from old Teresina. 

“You will come to-morrow?” said Gemma, slipping her 
hand into his. 

“ You will flout me if I do come.” 

“ No,” said Gemma. 

“ Yes, you will. It is always like that.” 

“ Try,” said Gemma ; and she kissed him. 

“ I will come,” said Signa ; and he went away through the 
dewy darkness, forgetting the stolen apricots and the choice of 
Tista. It was so very seldom that she would kiss him, and 
she looked so pretty in the moonlight. 

Gemma glanced after him through the bars of the high 
iron gate with the japonica and jessamine twisting round its 
coronet. 

Tista was going away on the morrow into the city to be 
bound ’prentice to a shoemaker, who was his mother’s cousin, 
and had oflered to take him cheaply. 

But it had not been worth while to tell Signa that. 

“ There would have been nobody to swing me if I had not 
<J* 


102 


SIGNA. 


coaxed him,” thought Gemma ; “ and perhaps he will bring 
me one of those big sweet pears of Bruno’s.” 

And the little child, well contented, ran off under her father’s 
shrill scolding for being out so late, and went in-doors and 
drank a draught of milk that Palma had begged for her from 
a neighbor who had a cow, and slipped herself out of her little 
blue shift and homespun skirt, and curled herself up on her 
bed of hay and fell fast asleep, looking like a sculptor’s sleeping 
Love. 


CHAPTER XI. 

A FEW days later fell the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, 
and Sign a for more than half a year had been promised a 
great treat. 

Bruno had said that on that- day he would take him to see 
the marble men and the painted angels of the Certosa Mon- 
astery, some ten miles away along the bend of the green Greve 
water. 

What Bruno promised he did always ; the child had the 
surest faith in his word ; and by five o’clock in the fair sunrise 
of the June morning, Signa slipped down the dark staircase, 
and undid the door, and ran out bareheaded into the sweet 
cold air, and stood waiting on the stones. 

The Madonna of Good Counsel smiled on him through her 
wooden wicket ; bells were ringing over the country around ; 
some tender hand had already placed before the shrine a fresh 
bunch of field-flowers ; the sky was red with the rose of the 
daybreak. 

He haff not waited long before a tall figure turned the 
corner, and Bruno’s shadow fell upon the slope. 

“You are ready? That is right,” he said, and without 
more words the child ran on by his side out of the lofty Fior- 
entina gate. 

The morning was fresh and radiant, very cold, as it always 
is in midsummer, before the sun has warmed the earth and 
drunk up the deep night dews that drench the soil. 

The shutters of the houses were unclosing, and through .the 


SIGN A. 


103 


open doors and in the darkness of the cellars there was the 
yellow gleam of wheat, cut and waiting for the threshers ; the 
gardens and yards were yellow, too, with piles of straw hats 
wetted and drying ; the shadows were broad and black ; men 
were beginning their work in the great arched smithies and 
workshops ; there was everywhere the smell of the wet eartli 
refreshed and cooled by night. 

They went along the road that leads to the Greve river ; — 
past the big stone barns where the flails would be at rest all day 
for sake of good St. Peter and St. Paul ; past the piles of 
timber and felled fir-trees that strewed the edge of the road ; 
past the old gray villa of the Della Stufa who nigh a thousand 
years before had come over the mountains, Christian knights 
and gallant gentlemen, with their red cross and their tawny 
lions on their shields ; the chapel bell was calliog the scattered 
cotters of Castagnolo to first mass ; past the pretty bridge of 
the Stagno (the pool), with its views of the far mountains, and 
the poplar-trees that the Latins named so because of the rest- 
lessness of their leaves, like the unresting mob ; past the great 
fortress of the Castel Pucci, once built to hurl defiance at the 
city itself, now white and silent, sheltering in its walls the 
woeful pain, and yet more woeful joys, of minds diseased ; 
past the worthy barber’s shop, where it is written up that he 
has only painted his sign with the tricolor to quiet tasteless 
whirligigs, he being a man of humor, with a pity kindred to 
contempt for all the weathercock vagaries of politics ; past the 
old, dirty, tumbledown, wayside houses, where the floors were 
strewn with the new straw picked for the plaiting, and the 
babies were lying in flat fruit-baskets, swaddled and laughing, 
and the girls were getting ready for mass with bright petticoats 
and braided hair and big ear-rings, and, if they were betrothed 
maidens, strings of pearls about their throats ; past all these, 
till they came to the Greve bridge, where they met a priest 
with the Host in the brightness of the festal day-dawn. 

They uncovered their heads and knelt down in the dust and 
prayed for the passing soul till the little bell, borne before the 
holy man, had tinkled away in the distance. Then they walked 
on by the Greve water under the shivering poplars and among 
the grazing sheep. 

There is no regular path along the river ; but they made 
one for themselves, brushing through the canes, getting round 


104 


SIQNA. 


the rushes, or, when it was needed, wading knee-deep, or 
oftener, for the water was low, walking in the stony sand of 
the dry river-bed. 

Once it was a warlike water enough, in the old days when 
the Satteringhi and Alberti, and Amagoli and Pandolfini, and 
all the other great races, Guelph and Ghibelline, had their 
fortified places bristling along its banks ; when its stone land- 
ing-quays were crowded with condottieri watering their horses 
ere they went to lend their lances to the strongest ; when 
mighty nobles in penitence raised shrines and built hospitals 
beside it to seek God’s grace upon their arms ; when the long 
lines of pilgrims wound along it, or the creeping files of sumpter- 
mules, or the bright array of Hawkwood’s White Company ; 
the Greve was then a busy stream, and was as often as not 
made red with the blood let out in many a skirmish or the 
inflected flames from a castle fired in feud. 

But all that is of the past. Now it is only a mill-race, a 
washing-pool, a ford, a fishing-burn, — anything the people like 
to make of it ; it sees nothing but the miller’s mules, or the 
grape-wagons, or the women with their piles of white linen ; 
and the only battles it beholds are the fighting of the frogs in 
the cane-brake or of the tree-sparrows in the air. Now the 
Greve is a simple pastoral river. No one has ever sung of it 
that one knows. It lies so near to the Arno, held dear by 
every poet and made sacred by every art, that the little Greve 
is as a daisy set beside a crown diamond ; and no one thinks 
of it. 

Yet perhaps — only one dare not say so for one’s life — ^per- 
haps it has as much real loveliness as Arno has. It has the 
same valley, it has the same mountains, it is encompassed by 
the same scenes and memories ; and it has a sylvan beauty, all 
of its own, like Wye’s or Dart’s or Derwent’s. 

Grassy banks where the sheep browse ; tall poplars, great 
oaks, rich walnuts, firs, and maples, and silver larch, and the 
beautiful cercis that blossoms all over in a night ; calm stretches 
of green water, with green hills that lock it in ; old water-mills, 
half hidden in maize and dog-grass and plumy reeds ; broken 
ground above, with winding roads from which the mule-bells 
echo now and then ; steep heights, golden with grain, or fra- 
grant with hay, and dusky with the dark emerald leaf of the 
innumerable vines ; deep sense of coolness, greenness, restful- 


SIGNA. 


105 


ness everywhere ; and then, where the river’s windings meet 
its sister stream the Ema, set in a narrow gorge between two 
hills, yet visible all along the reaches of the water while far 
ofiF, the monastery of the Cistercians — the Certosa — ending all 
the sweet song of peace with a great hymn to God. 

This is the Greve, — with flowering rushes in it, and the sun 
in its water till it glows like emeralds, and goats going down 
to drink, and here and there a woman cutting the green canes, 
and dragon-flies and swallows on the wing, and oxen crossing 
the flat timber bridge, and from the woods and rocks above the 
sound of chapel bells and reapers’ voices falling through the 
air, softly as dropping leaves. 

Bruno and the child kept always along the course of the 
water, walking in its bed or climbing its banks as necessity 
made them. 

Bruno was never a man of many words ; the national 
loquacity was not his ; he was fierce, sullen, taciturn ; but he 
smiled on the little lad’s ecstasies, and though he could tell him 
none of the ten thousand things that Signa wished to know, 
yet he said nothing that did not suit the joyous and poetic 
mood of the child ; for though Bruno was an ignorant man 
except in husbandry. Love is sympathy, and Sympathy is 
intelligence in a strong degree. 

Signa was wildly happy ; leaping from stone to stone ; 
splashing in the shallow water with a jump ; calling to the 
gossiping frogs ; flinging the fir-apples in the air ; clapping his 
hands as the field-mice peeped out from the lines of cut grain ; 
wondering where the poppies were all gone that a week before 
had “ run like torchmen with the wheat.” 

Once, his hands filled with blossoms and creepers from the 
hedges, he stopped to gather a little blue cornflower that had 
outlived the corn as mortals do their joys. 

“ Why is it called St. Stephen’s crown ?” he asked. 

“ How should I tell ?” said Bruno ; for indeed it seemed to 
him the silliest name that could be. 

“ Do you think it saw when they stoned him, and was 
sorry?” said Signa. 

“ How should a flower see ? You talk foolishness.” 

“ Flowers see the sun.” 

“ That is foolish talk.” 

“ And the moon, too, — else how could they keep time and 


106 


SIGNA. 


shut and go to bed ? And somebody must have named them 
all. Who was it?” 

Bruno was silent. Cattle liked dried flowers in their 
hay, and horses would not eat them, — that was all he knew 
about them, and when the child persisted, he answered him, — 
“ The saints, most likely.” 

But he said within himself, — 

“ If only the boy would pull off lizard’s tails, or snare birds, 
like other boys, instead of asking such odd questions that 
make one think him hardly sensible sometimes !” 

Signa, a little pacified, gathered his hands full, and ran on, 
puzzling his little brain in silence. He had a fancy that St. 
John had named them all one day out of gladness of heart 
when Christ had kissed him. That was what he thought, run- 
ning by the Greve water. 

Who did indeed first name the flowers ? Who first gave 
them, not their Latin titles, but the old, familiar, fanciful, 
poetic, rustic ones that run so curiously alike in all the difter- 
ent vulgar tongues ? 

Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna’s tears ; 
the wild blue hyacinth St. Dorothy’s flower ? Who first called 
the red clusters of the oleander St. Joseph’s nosegays, and the 
clematis by her many lovely titles, — consolation, traveler’s joy, 
virgin’s bower? Who gave the spiderwort to St. Bruno; the 
black briony for Our Lady’s Seal ; the corn-feverfew to St. 
Anne ; the common bean to St. Ignatius ; the bane-berry to 
St. Christopher; the blue valerian to Jacob for his angels’ 
ladder ; the toy wort to the shepherds for their purse ? Who 
first called the nyctanthes the tree of sadness, and the starry 
passiflora the Passion of Christ ? Who first made dedication 
of the narcissus to remembrance ; the amaranthus to wounded, 
bleeding love ; the scabious to the desolation of widowhood ? 
Who named them all first in the old days that are forgotten? 

It is strange that most of these tender old appellatives are 
the same in meaning in all European tongues. The little 
German madchen in her pine woods, and the Tuscan contadina 
in her vineyards, and the Spanish child on the sierras, and 
the farm-girl on the purple English moorlands, and the soft- 
eyed peasant that drives her milch-cows through the sunny 
evening fields of France, all gathering their blossoms from 
wayside green or garden wall, give them almost all the same 


SIGNA. 


107 


old names with the same sweet pathetic significance. Who 
gave them first ? 

Milton and Spenser and Shelley, Tasso and Schiller and 
Camoens, — all the poets that ever the world has known might 
have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, 
and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition 
has done, long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still 
make all the world akin. 

Meanwhile the man and boy came to a wooden bridge that 
bullocks were crossing, with flowers in their frontlets, and red 
tassels. There was a broken arch beyond of a bridge that the 
Greve had thrown down in flood. The reaped wheat was 
lying on the hills. The long cool grass tossed about to the 
water’s edge. Children were fishing in the shallows. 

Up above there was an open space, with a house that had a 
green bough over its door, and men drinking, and mules resting 
with their noses in fresh-cut cane-leaves. Here they left the 
bed of the stream, and went up on the high path that goes 
along the wooded heights with the bold green bluffs on either 
side, and the vines below, and the river under the aspens 
between them. 

They went along the path, which is hardly more than a 
mule- and ox-traqk, rising higher and higher, with the blue 
mountains behind them, through the blackberry brambles and 
the starry clematis ana the wild myrtle and the innumerable 
hill-flowers of all hues, and past a rambling farm-house called 
Assinaria, with old arched doorways, and a boy drawing water 
by a rope, standing in a high unglazed window, with blue shirt 
and brown limbs, against the dark behind him, like a figure 
painted upon an oaken panel ; and then ankle-deep through 
the sea of yellow corn strewn all about around the place 
awaiting threshing, and out on to a knoll of rock set thick with 
rosemary, and so on in view of the Certosa. 

The Certosa, afar off, above the stream, with the woods in 
front beneath it, so that it seemed lifted on a forest throne of 
verdure against the morning splendor of the east ; as he saw 
it, Signa was still a minute, and drew a deep, long breath. 

Approached from the Roman road, the monastery is nothing, 
— a pile of buildings, irregular, and only grand by its extent, 
on a bare crest of rock ; but approached from the Greve river, 
when the morning sun, shining behind it, shrouds its vast pile 


108 


SIGN A. 


in golden mist and darkens the wooded valley at its feet, the 
monastery is beautiful, and all the faith and the force of the 
age that begot it are in it : it is a Te Deum in stone. 

“ It looks as if the angels fought there,” said Signa, with 
hushed awe, as he stood on the sward and made the sign of 
the cross ; and indeed it has a look as of a fortress, Acciajoli, 
when he raised and consecrated it, having prayed the Republic 
to let him make it war-proof and braced for battle. 

“ Men fight the devil there,” said Bruno, believing what he 
said. 

The chimes of the monastery were ringing out for the first 
mass, — deep bells, and of sweet tone, that came down the river 
like a benediction on the day. 

Signa kneeled down in the grass. 

“ Did you pray for the holy men ?” Bruno asked him when 
they rose, and they went on under the tall, green, quivering 
trees. 

“No,” said Signa, under his breath. “ I prayed for the 
devil.” 

“ For him !” echoed Bruno, aghast. “ What are you about, 
child ? are you possessed ? do you know what the good 
priests would say ?” 

“ I prayed for him,” said Signa, with that persistency which 
ran with his docile temper. “ It is he who wants it. To be 
wicked there^ where Grod is, and the sun, and the bells !” 

“ But he is the foe of God. It is horrible to pray for him.” 

“ No,” said Signa, sturdily. “ God says we are to forgive 
our enemies and help them. I only asked him to begin with 
His.” 

Bruno was silent. He did not know what to say to the 
boy. The devil to him was a terrible reality ; had he not seen 
him, with his black, foul deformity and flame-vomiting jaws, 
on the frescoed walls, whenever he had entered any church in 
the heat of noon, to sit a little and turn his face to the 
pillars and hear the murmurs of low mass in some side-chapel ? 

The devil lived in the flesh for Bruno : the devil had made 
him stab Pippa ; the devil was always in the fire of his 
tongue and in the haste of his hand ; and these holy painters 
of the Church had surely seen the devil in the flesh, or how 
could they ever have portrayed him ? 

“Pray for those the devil enters, carino,” he said, softly. 


SJGNA. 


109 


“ When you have done with them, it will be time to pray for 
him ; and they count by tens of thousands.” 

“ It is best to pray for him, himself,” said Signa, with his 
docile determination to keep his own ideas which Nita so con- 
stantly endeavored to thrash out of him. “ Perhaps men made 
him bad because they would not leave him any hope of being 
better.” 

“ Do not talk of those things : the priests would not like 
it, Signa,” said Bruno, to whom such a manner of speaking 
of Satan seemed impious, — only the child was so young, — • 
heaven, he trusted, would not be angry. 

Signa was silent ; he obeyed an order always ; only he kept 
his own ideas : it was as a dog obeys a call, but keeps its 
instincts. 

But his joyous chatter was subdued. He kept looking up 
at the great monastery above the woods, that was all in a glow 
of sunlight, and where men fought the devil, and, perhaps, saw 
God. 

“ I would not fight him,” he thought to himself. “ I would 
just bring him out, and tell him to look down the river, and 
I think he would take no more pleasure in hell then.” 

And he fancied he saw golden-haired Michael and the angel 
that was called Gabriel leading the dark incarnate Sin out 
there into the light till the sun changed his sable wings to 
silver. 

Satan was as real to him as to Bruno : only he felt sorry 
for him, always sorry, when he heard the priests talk of him, 
and saw the old terrible pictures on the walls of all the woe 
he wrought, and the devouring flames. 

Signa had thought a great deal about all these things, sitting 
in the dusky aisle with his hand telling his beads and his little 
hot feet on the cold pavement, while they droned out the 
mass. 

There were other country-people w^aiting to go in. The 
peasants love these places : you will see them very often in 
little groups, hushed and yet happy, wandering very quietly 
through the aisles of the churches or monasteries, or sitting 
against the columns or in the shade on the altar steps. Thougli 
they are a mirthful people at times, and like their lotteries and 
dominoes and whirling dances and gossiping jokes, there is 
something in the solemn rest, in the serious dusky stillness, 


no 


SIONA. 


that suits tliem strangely ; the houses of Grod are really to 
them abodes of rest ; they take their tired limbs there and get 
repose actual as well as figurative ; perhaps they do not think 
about anything, but sit in a sort of day-sleep when their 
prayers are done ; but the infiuence of the place is with them, 
and their love for it is true. 

A white-frocked brother met them in the long vaulted 
passage-way, looking as though he had stepped out from some 
canvas of Del Sarto’s, and they went in with the five other 
contadini waiting there,— Bruno with his brown cloak on one 
shoulder and a clean shirt, and the child in rough white linen 
with a carnation at his throat ; a flower in the ear or at the 
throat is seen here so often with bare legs and feet. 

Signa, awe-stricken and full of the beauty of the place, was 
mute as they strayed through its cloisters and crypt, and fol- 
lowed the white-frocked brother, and passed other monks 
kneeling rapt in prayer or meditation. Only when he came 
to where the old bishop lies asleep in the wonderful marble of 
Francesco di San Grallo he was moved by a sudden impulse, 
and plucked the end of Bruno’s cloak. 

“ I should like to sing him something,” he whispered. 

“ Sing ? to whom ?” 

“ To that old man,” said Signa, and then colored, ashamed 
of himself. 

“ His soul is in heaven ; he would be angered,” said Bruno, 
in dismay. “ He hears much better singing than yours. 
Look ! the padre is shocked at you, and in this holy place !” 

Signa hung his head. 

“ Are you fond of singing, little fellow?” asked a stranger 
who had been looking at the Perugino on the wall. 

Signa nodded shyly. 

‘‘ And why do you want to sing to the dead bishop ?” 

“Because he is only asleep,” said Signa, timidly, “ and it 
might give him pretty dreams. Old Teresina says she always 
has good dreams towards morning, because I go under the 
house singing.” 

“ Sing, then,” said the stranger, and turned to the monk 
with some words of entreaty. 

“ If it be a holy song,” said the monk, with reluctant con- 
senting. 

“ He sings well,” said Bruno, with an outbreak of the tender 


SIGNA. 


Ill 


pride in Signa which he endeavored to conceal but could not 
always. 

Signa was shy and silent for a minute ; he wished he had 
not spoken of doing it, with this gi’and strange signore there ; 
but the old dead man’s face smiled at him, and the Holy Child 
in Perugino’s picture seemed to look down in expectation ; he 
forgot the living people ; the bishop and the Gesu were all he 
saw ; he joined his hands as if he were at prayer, and sang a 
sacrament hymn of Pergolesi that they sang in his own church. 

Whether the good bishop dead five hundred years, or hard- 
headed honest Perugino sleeping under the wayside oak in 
Frontignano, heard or not, who shall say till the secrets of the 
grave be loosed ? But the contadini standing reverently by, 
and the white-robed monk, and the listening stranger, heard, 
and held their breath. The monk turned his head a moment 
to Perugnio’s picture, to see if it were not some miracle being 
wrought there, and the Angels of the Nativity singing instead 
of this peasant child. 

Signa sang on as larks do, forgetting everything when once 
his voice was loosened on the air, and, without knowing what 
he did, left the hymn of Pergolesi, and sang on and on and 
on, — cadences that were to be traced to no written score, and 
that came to him, he never could tell how, — just as they came 
upon the mountain-side, with not a creature near. The words 
were the words of the Latin services, but the cadences were 
his own as much as the thrush’s are its own in the hawthorn- 
time. 

He might have sung on till sunset, if two other monks, 
drawn by the unwonted sounds, had not come near and looked 
on through the half-open door. The sound stopped him ; he 
paused, startled and half ashamed ; and not another note could 
be got from him. 

“ He is not angry,” he whispered to Bruno, looking at the 
statue. “ He is smiling still.” 

“ You would make marble smile, if it had frowned through 
ages till you sang,” said the stranger, while the monks mur- 
mured something of a gift of God. “ My pretty little boy, 
you may make the world hear of you ; your mouth will drop 
gold.” 

Signa glanced at him bewildered ; he understood nothing of 
this kind of language. 


112 


SIGNA. 


“ Come with me where I am painting,” said the stranger. 
“ I should like to hear who taught you your perfect phrasing, 
—who taught you to sing, I mean. Come with me a few 
minutes. Is that your father with you?” 

“ That is Bruno,” said Signa. For the first time it occurred 
to him — why had he no father? Was he born out of the old 
town from the stones and ivy, as the owls were? 

“ Not your father ? What is he to you, then ?” 

He is always good. I keep his sheep sometimes.” 

The artist did not ask any more ; the boy was some peas- 
ant’s son, — it did not matter whose. “But who taught you to 
sing?” he pursued. 

“ I sing in the churches at home.” 

“ But have you had no teacher ?” 

“No,” said Signa; then added, after a pause, “The birds 
do not have any.” 

“ But much that you sang, — it is no known music, — it is 
composed by some village genius of whom no one has heard?” 

Signa was very puzzled. 

“ I sing the music that I have in my head,” he said, after a 
little while. 

“ Then it is you who have the genius, — a second Mozart ?’ ’ 

Signa could not understand those words at all. Perhaps he 
was something wicked. Nita was always saying so. 

“ A genius ? that is a sin ?” he asked, shyly. 

The artist laughed. “ Yes ; unless you can sell it well. A 
sin sold well is half forgiven.” 

The child did not understand, but was a little frightened. 
To speak of sin at all was eerie in this great place, where men 
all day long and all night long fought the fiend. 

“ I should like to paint your face,” said the stranger ; “ as 
Perugino did the Holy Child’s that you look at so. Oh, a few 
lines will do, but I fancy your face will be well known to a 
great world one day, and you have a look in your eyes that is 
beautiful. Can you wait?” 

The child asked Bruno. Bruno was displeased, but an 
Italian has a respect for art and artists ; he muttered unwill- 
ingly that it was a feast-day, the boy might do as he liked for 
him ; it was a folly, but it would not hurt ; it was not as if it 
were a girl. 

The child went willingly into the room that is sacred to the 


SIONA. 


113 


Popes, and where dread Leo frowned on him. In the wide 
window looking to the north on to the purple mountains, 
there stood an easel and other things of a painter’s work ; the 
artist, being a great man, and bringing authority of govern- 
ments with him, was painting that glorious view, and living in 
retreat there for a few days. 

Bruno followed them ; he would have preferred that strangers 
should leave the boy alone ; he was jealous over him, and he 
thought that praise would make him vain. 

So Signa stood in his little white shirt, with his dark curls 
that had the gold light in them touching his throat, and the 
painter painted his head and shoulders, with his chest half 
bare, and the carnation bright against the skin. 

He swept the likeness in with the fast, broad, true touches 
of a great artist, who with a dozen strokes can suggest a whole 
picture, as Bembrandt drew Jan Six’s Bridge. 

In half an hour he had what he wanted, — a little face full 
of sadness and joy together, and most purely child-like, with 
a look in the eyes that would make women weep. 

He had been waiting for such a face in his great picture of 
the child Demophoon in the sacred fire ; for whose scene he 
had come to these purple hills and dreamful plains as all the 
old painters — and Baffaelle, in his days of wisdom — had come 
to these or such as these. 

To move the child to wondering interest and wake the eager, 
rapt look in his eyes, the painter talked to him, with easy 
graphic language, simple, yet eloquent, such as the child had 
never heard. 

He told him about the flowers he loved ; about the moun- 
tains ; about the dead Acciajoli, whose marble effigies were in 
the crypt below ; about Donatello, who had carved the stone 
warriors in their mighty rest ; about Guilimo, who had sculp- 
tured the fruits and flowers there to take away all terrors from 
the tomb ; about St. Bruno the founder, and of the far lone 
Alps, where he had dwelt, forbidding the sight of woman for 
many a mile around ; about the builder of this charter-house, 
Genele Orcagna, that good old man, who loved to paint Cupids 
frolicking with young maidens under orange-boughs, and brave 
youths hawking under sunny skies, and yet could draw Black 
Death as if he feared her not, but sent her upward through 
the air as though by allegory not to leave men without hope ; 


114 


SIGNA. 


one of those mighty men who could write sculptor on their 
canvas and painter on their marble ; one of those great, rich, 
wise lives that make the best of our own look so barren, spent 
in raising great piles and coloring beautiful things, and dwell- 
ing in peace and honor, and closing tranquilly when their 
course was run. Orcagna was writing sonnets when he died 
to a young lad he loved. Sixty years old, and yet with strength 
and youth and faith enough, and enough freshness of heart 
and soul, to write 'a sonnet that should please a boy ! These 
men had never, been bitten in the bud by the snake of Satiety, 
the wound which kills the Achilles of Modern Art. 

Bruno, stretched on a bench, lay still as a felled tree and 
listened. 

“ If I could talk like that to the boy he would love me 
better,” he thought ; but how was he to talk like that, — a man 
who knew how to make barley grow, and how to drive bullocks 
over the land, and how to cleanse the vines with sulphur, but 
no more ? 

He wished the painter would not tell the child the world 
would know of him; what use was there in that? Valdarno 
and the hills were world enough ; and were he to sing and the 
great unknown cities hear him, he would have to go away for 
that, and Bruno hoped to keep him always, — always, — always, 
and see him safe for all the future after him on that good 
piece of land on the hill-side, where Pippa had come through 
the bean-flowers at sunset. 

What better life was there than that, with the meek beasts 
on the corn-lands, high in the air among the vines ? 

Kings no doubt were higher, and great lords ; but Bruno 
pitied them. 

Two o’clock came, and the monks had their simple dinner 
in their refectory, and the same fare was brought to the artist 
as to any laity who may dwell there in retreat, and he made 
them bring portions for the contadino and the child, and added 
wine of his own getting, rich and rare. 

Bruno and Signa took it without ado, and with the simple 
animal-like grace which is bred in Italian blood as in the limbs 
of the chamois or the wings of the swallow. 

He was a great man, perhaps, and rich, no doubt, and far 
above them ; but why should they be ashamed to break his 
bread with him ? 


SIGN A. 


115 


They would have broken theirs with him. 

As for him, now he had the face he wanted, — the face that 
he had sought for high and low among the beautiful children 
of the Riviera, and always vainly, — he did not care how soon 
they went, nor where ; and yet the boy had a wonderful voice, 
— only children were so often wonderful in Italy that no one 
ever heard of when they were grown to men, — a precocious, 
swiftly passing, universal genius, that burst to beauty like a 
rose-laurel blossom, and dropped down without fruit. Still, 
this little barefoot boy, that sang to the dead bishop, had some- 
thing in his face that surely would not die. 

“ If I took you with mo to the big world they would make 
an idol of you, little lark,” he said, as the boy put down his 
white bowl of soup. “ Would you come if I would take you ?” 

Signa looked up to Bruno’s face and across at the hills that 
hid his old town from his sight. 

“ No,” he said, simply, but his face flushed all over suddenly ; 
a vague fancy, a dim possibility broke before him, like the 
faint rose that is promise of the sunrise. Only he was too 
young and knew too little to be able to be sure of what he 
thought. 

“ No ? Well, you are right,” said the great painter, smiling. 
“ To a million blanks one prize, only the prize is a proud one, 
once got ; though the men whose hands are empty deny it to 
console themselves. But be content in your life, little fellow ; 
it is a good one ; you are not like a town child, ‘ un brio 
d’herbe sans soleil entre deux paves.’ You have the sun and 
the air and the country : the old painters knew the value of 
these ; we do not. Look here, my pretty boy, take these 
pieces and buy what you fancy, and if you ever do wander 
far afield and want help, here is my name ; come to me and 
remind me of the Certosa, and such influence as I have with 
other men I will use for you. But if you are wise you will 
not wander. The ox-furrows are safer traveling than the city 
stones. Farewell.” 

He gave the boy two gold pieces of France, and smiled at 
him, and went within to the dormitory. He would not have 
minded the child remaining all the day, but he was tired of 
seeing that black-browed contadino stretched, listening and 
silent, on the bench. Besides, he wanted to go on with his 
landscape. 


116 


SIGNA. 


“ Am I to keep them ?” said Signa, looking down at the 
money in his palm. 

Money is money,” said Bruno, briefly. “ It is forty francs. 
Francs do not hang in the hedges.” 

Signa was silent in absolute amaze. He had never had a 
centime for his own in his whole life. He felt dizzy. 

Then all at once he gave a ringing shout of rapturous joy. 

“ I could buy the violin !” he cried, till the vault of the 
chamber echoed. 

It was to him as if he could buy the earth and the sun and 
the planets. 

“ Yes ; you can buy the violin,” said Bruno. 

Signa laughed all over his little face as a brook does when 
the sun and wind together please it ; he was beside himself 
with bewildered happiness ; he shouted, he leaped, he sang, he 
raced, regardless of the silence and sanctity of the place, till 
Bruno hurried him away, fearful that the good brethren might 
enter and be displeased. 

“ What did the paper say? you have forgotten the paper,” 
said Bruno, as they passed the pharmacy, where the monks 
were distilling their sweet odors and strong waters, with a del- 
icate fragrance of coriander and corornandel seeds, and of dried 
herbs and lemons and the like, upon the air. 

Signa, giddy and breathless, unfolded the crumpled scrap on 
which the painter had written his name with a pencil, his 
surname — Istriel — curtly, as men write who know that the one 
word tells all about them to the world. 

He spelt the name out slowly, but the line beneath it puzzled 
him : it was only an address in Paris, but then the little boy 
did not know what Paris meant. 

He crushed the slip of paper together with the gold, and 
ran out of the cool vaulted corridors that were so still and 
hushed and gray, like twilight, into the path that runs down 
the vines. 

“I can buy the violin!” he cried to the bright sky ; he 
thought that the sky smiled back again. 

After all, the angels had had thought of him. 

“ Oh, this wonderful day 1” he shouted. “ Oh, Bruno, are 
you not happy that we came?” 

“ I am glad if you are glad,” said Bruno. And that was 
the truth at all times. 


SIGNA. 


117 


Half-way down the hill Signa stopped and looked back to 
the monastery. ' 

“ I forgot to thank the Holy Child,” he said, with sharp 
contrition. 

“Which one? and for what?” 

“ The little Christ in the picture that they called Perugino : 
he sent me this to buy the violin. I am sure of that. He 
smiled at me all the while I sang, and I never said a prayer to 
thank him. Let me go back.” 

“ They would not let you in ; say your prayers to him at 
home ; he will be quite as pleased. But it was the painter 
who gave you the money.” 

“ It was the Holy Child sent it,” said Signa, who had seen 
so many frescoes of the heavenly host descending to mingle in 
the lives of men, and had heard so many miracles and legends, 
that the visible interposition of Perugino’s Gesu was only such 
a thing as he had looked for naturally. 

Well, the Gesu might, — ^why not? — thought Bruno: the 
child was worthy even of such memory. 

He did not know — it seemed presumptuous to think they 
could think in heaven of a child’s wish for a wooden toy ; but 
still, who could tell ? — it is such simple, humble, foolish hopes 
as these that keep the peasants’ hearts and backs from break- 
ing under the burden of unending toil. Untiring intelligence 
may live best without a faith, but tired poverty and labor must 
have one of some sort. Called by what name it may be, it is 
the self-same thing, the vague, sad, wistful hope of some far- 
olF, but certain, compensation. 

To Bruno, indeed, it seemed that the Gesu had sanctioned 
the spending of a vast fortune on a mere plaything ; it was 
the cost of a sheep or of a barrel of wine ; but he could no 
more have denied the child than he could have cut his hand 
off — besides, if the saints willed it. 

As for Signa, he had no doubt that heaven had sent it to 
him. He cried and laughed in his delight. Ho showed his 
gold to the birds, to the frogs, and to the butterflies. He 
leaped from stone to stone in the water, laughing at his 
own image. He stopped to tell every contadino he met, and 
every fisherman throwing a net from the canes. He ran 
through the hedges of acacia and clematis, and told the spiders 
weaving silver in the leaves. He stopped to tell the millers at 


118 


SIGNA. 


the mill-house over the river, where the good men leaned out 
of a little square window with the yellow light of a candle 
behind them, and above the moss-grown roof the apple boughs 
interlaced against a dreamy blue evening sky, like a Rembrandt 
set in a Raffaelle. He caught a big brown velvet stingless bee, 
and whispered it the story, and let it go free to carry the news 
before him to the swallows in the Lastra ; and when he came 
to the red cross that stands on a pile of stones, where the 
Greve is broad and green under the high woodlands, where 
the mighty Acciajoli once reigned, he knelt down and said the 
prayers he had forgotten, while the wind chased the shadows 
in the water, and the weir and the water-wheel sang to each 
other. 

“ Will it be too late to buy it to-night?” he said, as he saw 
Venus rise above the mountains from the sea. 

“Not if Tonino be not in bed,” said Bruno, who never 
could bear not to humor the child. So they walked on as fast 
as they could. 

“You are tired?” said Bruno. “If you are tired, get on 
my back.” 

“ I am not tired !” laughed the child, who felt as though he 
had wings, and could dart all the way home as swiftly and 
straight as a dragon-fly. It was quite dark when they reached 
the Lastra. 

It was a hot night. The mosquitoes and the little white 
moths were whirling round the few dusky lamps. There were 
lights behind the grated windows, and darksome doorways lit 
as Rembrandt loved. 

The men stood about in their shirt-sleeves, and the women 
lingered, saying good-night as they plaited the last tress. There 
were groups in the archways, and on the high steps, and in the 
bakers’ and wine-sellers’ shops, where the green boughs were 
drooping after the heat of the day. In uncurtained casements 
only lighted by the moon, young mothers undressed their suck- 
lings. There was a smell of ripe fruit, of drying hayj of fir- 
apples, of fresh straw, of that sea-scent which comes here upon 
the west wind, and of magnolia-flowers from the villas on the 
hills. 

Signa’s heart beat so fast he felt blind as he flew under the 
gateway and looked to see if Tonino had shut his house for 
the night. 


SIONA. 


119 


His heart leaped in him as he saw a light in the place, and 
the big keys magnified in the shadow till they were fit for the 
very keys of St. Peter, and in the door the locksmith himself, 
with bare arms and easy mind, chatting with his neighbor, 
Dionisio the cobbler. 

Signa darted to him. 

“ Give it me ! quick — quick — quick ! — oh, please, good 
Tonino !” he panted. “See, here are the forty francs, — all 
beautiful real gold, — and the fair child in the monastery sent 
it to me to-day. Quick — quick, oh, dear Tonino ! You never 
have sold it while we were away ?” 

“ The child pleased an artist to-day, and sat for a picture, 
and so got the money. Let him have the toy,” said Bruno, 
following, to the astonished Tonino, who had stretched out a 
hand by sheer instinct to seize the boy, making sure that he 
had stolen something. 

“ I have not sold it,” he said, with wide-open eyes. “ But 
buy it ! — forty francs ! — the like of you, you little bit of a 
fellow ! It cannot be ! It cannot be !” 

“ Oh, dear Tonino !” cried the child, piteously, and he began 
to tremble all over with dread, his color went and came hotly 
and whitely in the yellow gleams of the locksmith’s brass 
lamp, and he could hardly speak plain for excitement, with 
both his hands clinging to the man’s bare arms. “ Oh, dear, 
good Tonino, you never have sold it? oh, say you have not 
sold it ! Here is the gold, — beautiful real money, — and you 
never do have gold in Signa, and pray, pray do let me have it 
quick ; I have longed for it so, — oh, you never will know how ! 
Only I said nothing, because you all scolded and laughed ; and 
now perhaps you have sold it. Bo say you have not sold it !” 

And Signa broke down, crying with a very rain of tears in 
the reaction from this immeasurable joy to fear. 

Bruno’s hand fell heavily on the locksmith’s shoulder. 

“It is good money. You cannot refuse your own price. 
Let the boy have the fiddle.” 

“ But a baby like that !” stammered Tonino. “ And if there 
are painters about that pay so, there is my little Grinna, rich 
and rosy as a tomato, and how can you, even in conscience, let 
that brat squander such a heap of wealth, — the price of a calf 
almost, and a barrel of wine quite, and the best wine in the 
commune too ; and sure he ought to be made to take it to that 


120 


SIGN A. 


good soul Lippo, who has kept him, body and soul together, 
all these years, when any other man would have let such a 
little mouse drown in the flood where he came from ; and I do 
not think I could in conscience let the lad throw all that away, 
and he a beggar, one may say, unless I speak to Lippo and 
Nita first, and they be willing, because ” 

Bruno’s eyes took fire with that sudden light which all the 
Lastra had dreaded since he had been a stripling, and his hand 
went inside his shirt, where, about the belt of his breeches, he 
was always believed to carry a trusty knife, notwithstanding all 
law and peril. 

“ Keep your conscience for your neighbors’ kettles and pans 
that you send home with new holes when you solder the old 
ones !” shouted Bruno. “ Out with the fiddle, or, as the saints 
live above us, choked you shall be, and dead as a door-nail. 
Take the gold and fetch me the toy, and learn to preach to me 
if you dare !” 

“ But in conscience ” stammered the locksmith. 

“ Grive the child the plaything,” he cried, in a voice of 
thunder, shaking him as a dog does a chicken, “ or it shall be 
the worse for you. You know me 

“ I would take the gold when I could get it, if I were you, 
Tonino,” whispered the cobbler, who was a man of peace. 
“ Grold is a rare sight for sore eyes in Signa, and what is 
Lippo to you?” 

“ That is true,” murmured the locksmith, frightened out 
of his wits, and thankful for any excuse to yield. “ But it is 
only to-day that I heard that the fiddle is worth quite double. 
There is a great singer come to stay at one of the villas who 
saw it ; and to let a child have it who will break it — never- 
theless, to please a neighbor ” 

And, having soothed himself a little with this elaborate and 
useless fiction, as his country-folk will, always deriving a very 
soothing and softening effect from the pleasure of lyipg, To- 
nino went grumbling within, and poked about with his dim 
lamp, and came out slowly with the violin, and clutched the 
two gold pieces before he would let it go. Signa, who stood 
trembling with wild excitement, took the precious instrument 
in both his hands with trembling reverence, the tears falling 
fast down his cheeks. 

“ Beast ! you have made him cry !” muttered Bruno, and 


SIGNA. 


121 


kicked tlie locksmith into his own doorway with a will, and 
laid his hand on the child’s shoulder, and strode up the street 
of the Lastra, glancing from right to left with mute challenge 
if any man should have the courage to stop his progress. 

No one attempted to call him to account. Tonino was not 
a popular man, and the weight of Bruno’s wrath and the 
keenness of his knife had been felt by more than one of the 
eager, chattering audience who leaned out of the windows and 
crowded each other in the doorways, in breathless hope to see 
a pretty piece of stabbing. 

Bruno went through them in silence. Signa trotted by his 
side, his hands clasping the violin to his chest, and his great 
eyes dewy with tears, yet radiant as jewels, in his joy. 

Tonino grumbled that if a man made such a sweet morsel 
of his own bastard he should not be above the owning of it. 
and went to his bed with sore bones and a grieved heart that 
he had not asked double for the fiddle; though for more 
years than he could remember he had always thought it worth- 
less lumber. 

Bruno and Signa went up the street in the moonlight, with 
yellow flashes now and then falling across them from the 
lamps swinging in the doorway. 

“ Where will you play on it, dear little lad,” said Bruno, 
gently, “ if you take it home ?” 

The child looked at him with the smile of a child dreaming 
beautiful things in its slumber. 

“ I will keep it at old Teresina’s. She will let me, and I 
will bring it to you when I come. Oh, is it really, really true 
that I have got it ?” 

“ Quite true ; and it is dearer to you already than the old 
lute, Signa f” 

Signa was silent. Bruno had given him the lute. 

They passed out of the Lastra and along the road into the 
street that curves towards the bridge. It was quite dark ; but at 
the little cafe there which looks towards the river, several men 
were drinking and playing dominoes on the stones by the feeble 
light of the brass oil-lamps. Bruno saw Lippo among them. 

He put his own tall form with the dark cloud of his brown 
cloak between Lippo and the child, and strode on carelessly 
without stopping. 

‘‘ Good-night,” he called out. “ I am taking the boy up with 

F 11 


122 


SIGN A. 


me. I want him to help stack wheat, and he will have to be 
up at four, so he had best sleep on the hill.” 

Lippo nodded, and hardly looked up from his dominoes. 

They went on over the bridge unquestioned. 

The bridge had many groups upon it, as on all hot nights, 
leaning against the parapets, and chatting in the cheerful, gar- 
rulous Tuscan fashion. The moon was bright on the wide 
reaches of the river. The sky was studded with stars. 

On a summer night Signa loses her scars of war and age, 
and is young as when Hercules shook her sunny waters from 
his sunny locks, resting from labor. 

The child looked up at the stars. He wondered if ever in 
all the world there had been so happy a thing as he. And 
yet he could only see the stars through his tears ; he did not 
know why the tears came. 

An aziola owl went by with its soft cry, — 

“Such as nor voice nor lute nor wind nor bird 
The soul ever stirred, 

Unlike and far sweeter than they all.’’ 

“ Oh, dear Chiou !” said Signa to the owl, calling it by the 
familiar name that the people give it, “ will you tell the little 
Christ how happy I am, and the old dead bishop too ? They 
may think I am thankless because I cry. Do tell them, Chiou, 
you go so near the sky !” 

“ What fancies you have !” said Bruno ; but the little 
brown hand was hot as it touched his own. “ You are tired 
and excited,” he said, more gravely. ‘‘ You dream too much 
about odd things. That owl is hunting gnats and mice, and 
not thinking about the angels.” 

“ I am not tired,” said Signa ; but he was walking lame, 
and his voice was weak and trembled. 

Bruno, without asking him, lifted him up in his arms ; he 
himself was a strong man, and the light burden of the thin 
little lad was a small one to him. 

“ Gro to sleep : I will carry you up the hill,” he said, put- 
ting the child’s head down against his shoulder. Signa did 
not resist. He still clasped the violin to him. 

Bruno went up the steep road where his mother had carried 
him through the darkness and cold before she stumbled and 
fell. 


SION A. 


123 


With rest and fatigue Signa dropped asleep, and did not 
awaken all the way up the long lonely paths through the vines 
and the reaped fields. 

“ How he loves that thing already ! — as never he will love 
me,” thought Bruno, looking down at him in the starlight 
with that dull sense of hopeless rivalry and alien inferiority 
which the self-absorption of genius inflicts innocently and un- 
consciously on the human affections that cling to it, and which 
later on Love avenges upon it in the same manner. 

Bruno, nevertheless, was glad that he had it. Fierce and 
selfish in all his earlier life, he had taught himself to be gentle 
and unselfish to Pippa’s son. He carried him into the house, 
still sleeping, and laid him down under the crucifix on a pile 
of hay, and would have undressed him, but the child, mur- 
muring, resisted, clasping the violin to him, as though in his 
sleep afraid that any one should take it from him. 

So Bruno left him as he was upon the hay, with his tum- 
bled curls, and his violin folded in his crossed arms, in the 
deep dreamless slumber of a great fatigue, and lit a lantern and 
went round to fodder the cow and see to the ass and make sure 
that all had been safe during his absence, and then, with his 
loaded gun beside him, lay down to rest himself. 

He had not been asleep an hour himself before he was awak- 
ened by silvery sweet music that seemed to him to be like 
the voices of all the nightingales in May singing together ; 
but the nightingales were most of them dumb now, — now that 
the lilies were dead and the hay garnered. 

Bruno started up, and listened, and looked : he too believed 
in a dim sort of way in the angels ; only he never saw them 
come down on the slant of the sun-rays, as the good men had 
done that had decorated the churches. 

The moon was shining into the house ; by the white cool 
light he saw that it was the child sitting up in the hay and 
playing. Signa’s eyes were open and lustrous, but they had a 
look in them as if he were dreaming. 

His chin was resting on the violin ; his little hands fingered 
the strings and drew the bow ; his face was very pale ; he 
looked straight before him ; he played in his sleep. 

Bruno listened aghast ; he had a melodious ear himself, the 
music was never wrong in a chord ; it was sweet as all the 
nightingales in the country singing all together. 


124 


SION A. 


He dared not wake the boy, who played on and on in the 
moonlight. 

“ It is the gift of God,” thought Bruno, awed and sorrow- 
ful ; because a gift of God put the child farther and farther 
from him. 

He listened, resting on one arm, while the owls cried “ Woe !” 
from the great walnut-trees over the house-roof. The sweet 
melody seemed to fill the place with wonder, and to live in the 
quivering rays of the moon, and to pass out with them through 
the lattice among the leaves, and so go straight to the stars. 

A little while, and it faltered a moment, and then ceased. 
Signa’s head dropped back, his eyes closed, his hands let the 
violin sink gently down ; he slept again as other children 
sleep. 

“ It is the gift of God ; one cannot go against God,” said 
Bruno, making the sign of the cross on his own broad breast. 
And he was very sorrowful, and yet proud; and could not bear 
that it should be so, and yet would not have had it otherwise ; 
as men were in the old days of faith whose sons and daughters 
went out to martyrdom. 

When he got up to his labor before the sun was up, and 
while the faintest rose-red alone glowed beyond the mountains 
in the east, he stepped noiselessly, not to awaken the boy, and 
left him sleeping while he went out to his work at the stacking 
of corn, with the earth dim with shadow and silvered with 
dew. 

He thought of the child and the gifts of God. He did not 
know that he had seen Pippa’s lover. 


CHAPTER, XII. 

“ Where is the little bit of paper with the name on?” said 
Bruno, eating his bit of black bread when the morning was up 
wide and golden over all the harvest-land. 

Signa lifted up his head from his violin. “ I lost it. When 
I caught the bee, coming home, the paper flew away ; the 
winds took it. Does it matter ?” 


SIONA. 


125 


“ No. Only it might have been a friend for you. Do you 
recollect the name ?” 

Sign a shook his curly head. 

Recollect anything ! — with the violin in his hand, and the 
music dancing out on the sunbeams, and saying everything for 
him that he never could say for himself! 

What was the name to him? the giver of the gold had only 
been the ministrant of the little Christ. 

Bruno let him alone. 

The boy was so happy, sitting in the shade there, trying all 
cadences that came to him on this new, precious, wondrous 
thing, he had not the heart to call him to come out in the sun 
and carry the wheat. He had been too rough with Pippa. 
He atoned by being too gentle with this child. 

So he went out into the fields again by himself, and built 
up his stacks, made low because (5f the hurricanes that come 
over when there are white squalls upon the sea, and covered, 
till there should be time to thatch them, with snowy linen 
cloths, so that they look like huge mushrooms growing for the 
table of Gargantua. 

When he had been at work some two or three hours, hear- 
ing at intervals, when the wind blew it towards him, the song 
of the violin that the boy was enjoying within, with the cow 
in her shed, and the sitting hens, and the tethered goat and 
her kid for listeners, he heard the little feet that he knew 
patter over the stubble, and from his half-completed stack 
looked down on Signa’s upraised face. 

The child had the violin with him. 

“ Bruno,” he asked, shyly, “ I have been thinking : there 
is old Nunziata often without bread, and Giudetta, whose 
children all died of those poison-berries, and Stagno the blind 
man, that has no legs either, and — and so many of them that 
want so much, and are only hungry and sad : was it selfish 
of me not to give them the money between them, — was it 
wicked to have the violin ? I am sure the angels meant the 
violin, you know ; but still did the angels wish me to think 
of others or all of myself? What do you think ? Do you 
think I was wrong?” 

“Anyway, it is too late now, bambino,” said Bruno, with 
the curtness of his natural speech." “ You have wanted the 
violin a year: why spoil the pleasure of it?” 

11 * 


126 


SIGNA. 


“ But was it selfish ?” persisted Signa. 

“ Why worry yourself? it is done.” 

“ But it was, then ?” cried the little fellow, with a sort of 
feverish pain. 

Bruno came down the ladder and took up more corn. 

“ Oh, no : you things that love sounds or sights or bits of 
wood or oils and earths better than human creatures, always 
are selfish, so. But I don’t know why ever you should be 
blamed. There is no more selfish beast than a cow with her 
calf, or a woman with her wean. Why should you not have 
your fiddle like that? only you will be like Frisco. I knew 
Frisco : he thought of nothing but saving every scrap of money 
to buy things to paint with, and he was always after the 
churches and gateways and places where the colors are ; and 
he said it was a fine gift, and a glorious one. I am not say- 
ing it was not : only he went away and left his old mother to 
be kept by the commune, and people say he is a great man 
away in Borne ; but the old soul is dead, and never saw him 
again. Not that it is for me to say evil of any man.” 

“ But I have no mother,” said Signa. 

Bruno shrank as though a grass-adder had stung him, and 
stooped and gathered more corn again. 

“ No, dear,” he said, after a moment, very gently: “ make 
a mother of your music if you can. The good God gave it 
you in her stead. And it is not selfish, dear: you praise 
heaven in it, and make the children dance with joy, and the 
old folks forget they are old when they hear you. Do they 
not say so in the Lastra a thousand times ? Do not fret your- 
self, Signa. The angels sent you the fiddle. Be glad in it. 
To quarrel with happiness is to quarrel with God. It is but 
seldom he sends any : perhaps he would send more, only 
whenever they get it people spoil it by fuming and fretting, 
as a bad spinner knots the smooth flax. Play to the sick 
folk and the old and the sorrowful. That will be the way to 
please the little Christ.” 

Signa was comforted, and sat down among the loose wheat 
and played all his little fancies away on those strings that were 
to him as of silver and gold, whilst the cicale buzzed in chorus 
in the tree-tops, and all the field-finches strained their pretty 
throats in rivalry. 

But he did not play gayly, as he had done in the house. 


SION A. 


127 


He was afraid the Gresu was not content ; and why had he no 
mother, as other boys had ? 

Bruno, working on the top of his golden rick, could have 
bitten his own tongue out for having reminded the child of 
that. 

Signa never asked any questions. They had told him he 
had come on the wave of the flood, and for himself he thought 
that the owls had dropped him there. But then it was never 
of any use to ask an owl. They never said anything to any 
one, except “ Chiou, chiou !” “ Woe, woe !” 

Bruno sent him away at sunset, with a big basket of beans 
and cabbages for Nita, to propitiate her into good humor. 

It was cheating his lord, because it is understood that what 
a cantadino takes for eating shall be what is needed in his own 
house ; but Bruno did not see harm in it : the men who would 
not take a crumb out of their master’s dwelling for all the 
temptings of the worst hunger will never see any sin in taking 
them ofiP the soil they labor on, and Bruno was no better than 
his neighbors. Besides, he would have done a wrong thing 
knowingly, to serve or help the child. 

“ I should love him little if I would not take a sin on my 
own soul for his welfare,” he said to himself often : that was 
his idea of how he ought to keep his word to Pippa. He did 
not argue it out so clearly as that, because peasants do not an- 
alyze ; but the sense of it moved him always. 

So Signa kissed his old lute in farewell, and laid it away on 
the old marriage-box under the crucifix, and sprinkled rose- 
leaves on it, and meadow-mint, because he fancied it would 
like sweet smells, and then shouldered his big skip full of 
vegetables, and made his way down the hill, hugging the violin 
close to him. 

The waning moon hung silvery and round over the town as 
he entered. In many of the interiors and in the stone barns 
the men were threshing, the flails heaving and falling in 
pleasant regular cadence, the workers knee-deep in the yellow 
grain. A few machines hum in Tuscany, but they are very 
few: they fear to spoil the straw for the plaiters, and they 
cling still to the old ways, these sons of Ceres Mammosa. 

The rush skip on his back was heavy, but his heart was 
light as he went. The wonderful wooden thing that he could 
make sing like a nightingale was all his own forever. 


128 


SIONA. 


Only to think what he could do ; all that he heard — and 
he heard so much, from the birds and the bees and the winds 
at dawn, and the owls at night, and the whispering canes and 
the poplars down by the water, and the bells that swing for 
prayer — he could tell again on those wonderful strings, of 
whose power and pathos the child, all untaught, had a true 
intuition. 

With the violin against his shoulder he felt strong enough 
to face the world and wander over it, — ten years old only 
though he was, and of no more account than a little moth, 
that a man can kill with a wave of the hand. 

The fancy came once to him to go away, with the w^ooden 
Rusignuolo, as he called it, and see what people would do to 
him, and what beautiful things he could hear going along the 
roads, and into the strange streets, playing. If only he had 
not loved the town so well ; but every stone of the Lastra was 
dear to him. They held his feet to the soil. 

And, besides, he was only a little child, and the mountains 
looked too high for him to climb, though those old painters, 
he knew, must have gone higher still, or how could they have 
seen the clouds and the little angels and amorini that dwell in 
the worlds where the rose never fades and the light never 
ceases ? 

But neither mountains nor clouds were within his reach : so 
he only trotted down into the Lastra with his skip of cabbages 
and beans upon his little tired back, very happy because he 
had his heart’s desire ; and if he had been selfish he had asked 
to be forgiven : none of us can do more. 

All people were still astir in the place ; by eight of the 
clock it is nearly dark under these hills when once the day of 
St. Peter and St. Paul is past ; they were sitting about in the 
street ; the doorways showed the golden straw that the girls 
were still sorting ; there was the smell of the fields everywhere ; 
oxen in red wagons crept through the twilight, taking grain 
to the threshing-barns ; men came in from the river-side with 
their nets wet, and their bare legs shining with sand, and their 
pumpkin gourds full of little fish ; here and there was a brown 
monk with his huge straw hat on his shoulders and his rosary 
dangling in front of his knees. 

He nodded up at old Teresina ; eighty years old, and spin-\ 
ning at a high window under the gateway ; she would let him 


SIGNA. 


129 


go and play his violin there in her little dusky den, among 
the ropes of onions and the strings of drying tomatoes, and 
with the one little square lattice looking out to the bold moun- 
tain of the high Albano range, that rises above Artimino and 
Carmignano, and takes all the rose of the dawn and all the 
purples of the storm and wears them as its own, and has the 
sun go down behind it and the star of love rise from it. 

Then he ran up the little dark stairs into the room where 
she lived ; a bright old soul, with many daughters and sons 
and grandchildren scattered over the place ; a good spinner 
and good plaiter still, though nigh eighty years old ; she had 
spent all her years here under the western gate ; seeing the 
harvest-wagons and the grape-barrels come and go for nearly 
three-fourths of a century ; she could remember the French 
fellows with Murat riding through ; she had sat at her window 
and watched them ; she had just married then ; she had seen 
the sun sink down over the mountains, calm and golden or red 
and threatening, every night of her life ; and had never slept 
elsewhere than here where the warders had lighted their 
beacons and pointed their matchlocks in the old days long 
before her, when news came that the Pisans were marching 
from the sea ; the Lastra was her world, but it had been wide 
enough to make her shrewd and keen of sight, and happy 
enough to keep her kindly of temper and of quick sympathy 
with youth and childhood. 

Of the child Signa she was very fond ; she liked to be 
awakened in the dark mornings by his fresh voice caroling 
some field-song of the people as he went out under the gate- 
way to his work. And she was one of the few folks who 
liked Bruno better than his gentler brother. 

“ I have seen them both with their bullocks when they 
were lads,” she would say to her neighbors. “ Bruno made 
his do a hard day’s work, but he fed them well, and never 
galled them, and the beasts loved him. Lippo would hang his 
with tassels and flowers, and pat them if people were looking ; 
but he would prick them twenty times an hour and steal their 
fodder and sell it for a penny and play morra. Bo not talk 
to me ! the fierce one for my money !” 

So when Signa ran in to her and told her the story of the 
violin, not very coherently, mingling the locksmith and the 
little Christ and the gold pieces and the marble bishop all 

F* 


130 


SIGNA. 


together in an inextricable entanglement, Teresina was sympa- 
thetic, and held up her hands, and believed in the angels, and 
wondered at the beautiful gift with all the ardor that he could 
have desired, and said, of course, to be sure he might keep it 
there, — why not? — and play it there too, she hoped, and 
opened for its safer concealment the heavy lid of a great chest 
she had in her chamber ; one of those sarcophagus-like coffins 
which the Middle Ages made in such numbers and ornamented 
with such lavish care ; this one was of oak wood, very old ; 
and a hungry connoisseur had told her that it was of the 
workmanship of Dello, and had offered her any money for 
it ; but she had told him that Dello, whoever he was, was 
nothing to her, and that the chest had held her bridal linen, 
and now held her cere-clothes all ready, and all of her own 
spinning, and would hold her grand-daughters’ and great grand- 
daughters’ after her, she hoped. 

So the chest, whether of Dello or not, remained in its corner, 
and she opened it and let Signa lay his Rusignuolo in it on 
her bridal sheets and her shroud that she had finished last 
winter and was very proud of, and helped him cover it with 
the dead rose-leaves and the sprigs of lavender which she had 
put there to keep moths away, and the bough of cypress which 
she had laid there to bring good luck. 

So Signa, quite sure that all was safe, went away quite happy, 
and shouldered his creel again, and went towards Lippo’s 
house. 

Signa turned up by the old shrine that has the gray wood 
door and the soft pink color and the frescoed seraphs by the 
high south gate, and mounted the paved steep lane to Lippo’s 
house. 

There was a little gossiping crowd before it ; old Baldo 
with his horn spectacles shoved up on his forehead, and Momo 
the barber, who had a tongue for twenty, and Caccarello the 
coppersmith, and several women, foremost of whom was Nita 
screaming at the top of her voice, with both hands in air in 
gesticulation, and Toto beating the drum tattoo with a metal 
spoon on a big frying-pan as a sort of chorus to his mother’s 
cries. 

Whilst still he toiled up the lane, concealed from their view 
by his burden of cabbages, he caught her flying sentences, 
scattered like dry peas rolling out of a basket. 


SIGNA. 


131 


Two hundred francs in gold ! given him, all for his peak- 
ing little face, and thrown away, — thrown away, — thrown away 
on a wretched creaking thing that Tonino kept among his 
nails and his keys ! and never a centime brought to us ! to 
people that took him out of the water like a half-drowned 
pup and have spent our substance on him ever since as if he 
were our own. Oh, the little viper ! — fed at my breast as he 
was and laid in the cradle with my own precious boy ! Two 
hundred francs all in gold, — all in gold ! and the horrid little 
wretch squanders it on a toy with a hole in it for the wind to 
come out of, squeaking like a mouse in a trap. But there 
must be law on it ! — there must be law ! that brute Tonino 
could not claim a right to take such swarms of money from a 
pauper brat !” 

“ Nay,” said the barber, “ Tonino tells us he swore his con- 
science was hair-on-end at such a thing. But when a man 
has a knife at his throat ” 

“ I saw the steel touch him, as he shivered,” swore Cacca- 
rello the coppersmith. 

“ And the fiddle was worth a thousand francs. It was a 
rare Cremona,” whined the barber. “ It is poor Tonino that 
is cheated, — near as bad as you, dear neighbor !” 

“ But the money was not the little brat’s ; it belonged to 
those who nourished and housed him,” said a fat housewife, 
who often gossiped with Baldo over a nice little mess of oil 
and onions. 

“ That, of course,” said Caccarello. “ But Lippo is so meek 
and mild. He has lackered up that byblow as if it were a 
prince’s lawfully-begotten son and heir.” 

“ Lippo is a heaven-accursed fool,” said old Baldo, with a 
blow of his staff, — he was never weary of telling his opinion 
of his son-in-law, — “but he is not to blame here. He never 
could have fancied that a little beast would come home with 
the price of a prime bullock and go and waste it on a fiddle 
without a thought of by your leave or for your leave, or any 
remembrance of all he owed in common gratitude for bed and 
bread. The child could be put in prison, and so he ought to 
be ; what is a foundling’s gain belongs to those that feed him. 
That is fair law everywhere. If Lippo were not daft, he 
would hand the boy over to the law and let it deal with lim.” 

“ Bravo !” said the little crowd, in chorus ; for Baldo was a 


132 


SIGNA. 


well-to-do old man and much respected, wearing a silk hat and 
velvet waistcoat upon feast-days. 

“ Ay, truly,” said Nita, stretching her brawny brown arms 
in all the relish of anticipated vengeance, while Toto beat 
louder on his frying-pan, and called in glee, — 

“ And you will shave his head now, mother ? and give me 
that gilt ball of his to sell ? and when his back is raw as raw, 
you will let me rub the salt in it ?” 

Nita kissed his shaven crown, forgetful of the character for 
goodness that she had been at such pains to build up before 
her townsfolk ; but Lippo, mindful of his fair repute, reproved 
him. 

“ Only a little wholesome chastisement : that is all we ever 
allow ; you know that, my son.” 

And Toto grinned. He knew his father’s tricks of 
speech. 

The neighbors thought nothing of it : take a brat off the 
face of the flood and bring it up out of charity, and then see 
it squander the flrst money that it touched upon a fiddle, 
without so much as bringing home a soldo ! they were unani- 
mously of 9pinion that it would have provoked a saint into 
exchanging her palm-sheaf into a rod of iron. 

A fiddle, too, that Totino swore was worth a thousand francs, 
if one, and a purest old Cremona ; as if an oat pipe cut in 
the fields were not good enough for this little cur picked out 
of the muddy water ! And then they all of them had chil- 
dren too, — pretty children, or, at least, children they all thought 
pretty, — and where was ever a painter found to give them 
money for their faces ? 

Money was scarce in the Lastra, and popular feeling ran 
strong and high against Signa for having ventured to have a 
piece of good fortune fall upon him. If he had brought it 
home, now, and put it in Lippo’s strong box, and Lippo had 
given them all a supper with it, and played a quarter of it 
away in morra or draughts, as no doubt he would have done, 
then indeed they might have pardoned it. But a fiddle ! and 
not a single centime for themselves ! 

“ Punish him I will,” murmured Lippo, goaded to despera- 
tion, but thinking woefully of what his brother would say, or, 
worse still, do, on his own skin and bones. “ Still, he is such 
a little thing, and saved by me, as one may say, — not that I 


:S1GNA. 


133 


take merit. It is a horrible thing, all that good gold squan- 
dered on a fiddle, and we robbing our precious children nine 
long years to feed a bastard deserted by those that had the 
right ; and yet, dear friends, a child no older than my 
Toto ” 

“ Maudlin ass,” quoth Baldo, in high wrath, while the barber 
said that Lippo was too great a saint to live, and the others 
answered that such goodness was beautiful, but Lippo must 
look at home ; and all the while Nita screamed on to the night- 
air, bewailing. 

Signa heard. What had he done ? That they had power 
to put him in prison he never doubted. That they had power 
to beat him — why not to do anything else ? 

Signa heard, as he labored up the hill beneath his load of 
cabbages, the angry voices rolling down the slope and drifting 
to the Madonna sitting with the glory round her head behind 
her little wooden wicket. 

The poor Madonna often heard such words. When they 
had spoken them worst they gave her flowers. 

His limbs shook, and his heart sank within him. Yet one 
great thought of comfort was with him, — the fiddle was safe 
under its rose-leaves and its lilac mint-flowers. Teresina would 
not let it go. 

He understood that the story of his buying the violin had 
run through the Lastra, gathering exaggerated wonders as it 
went. Indeed, if only he had thought a little, he would have 
known that the scene at the locksmith’s shop by the archway 
never could pass without being talked about by the dozen idle 
folks who had nothing to do but to watch it. 

But even Bruno had not thought of that. Italians love 
secrets ; but they bury them as the ostrich buries her head. 

Toiling up under his overshadowing cabbages, and in the 
dusk of the evening, they did not see him. The loud shrill 
voices thrilled to his very bones. 

“ Let me get at him !” thundered old Baldo, who echoed his 
daughter always. “ Two hundred francs ! The little brute ! 
And he owes me that for lodgment ! Oh, Nita mine, now see 
what comes of taking nameless mongrels ” 

“ Two hundred francs !” moaned Lippo, his voice shaking 
with a sort of religious horror, “ when he might have brought 
half to my wife, who has been an angel of mercy to him, and 

12 


134 


SIGN A. 


spent the other half in masses for his poor dead mother’s soul, 
which all the devils are burning now !” 

“ That is the thought of a good man, but of an ass !” said 
Baldo, bluntly. “ They should have come to your strong box 
and mine, son ; and as many francs as there were shall he have 
lashes !” 

“ Let me get at him ! — let me get at him ! Oh, the little 
snake, that I suckled at my breast, robbing my own precious 
child for him ! Two hundred francs ! two hundred francs ! 
A year’s rent ! — a flock of sheep ! — wine to flood the town ! — 
wagons of flour ! — ten years’ indulgence ! — half this world and 
all the next, why, one might buy for such a sum as that ! 
And flung away upon a fiddle-case ! But to prison the child 
shall go, and Tonino must disgorge. Let me only catch him ! 
Let him only come home !” 

Signa, in the dark upon the stones, looking up, saw this 
excited crowd, with waving hands, and fists thrust into each 
other’s eyes, and faces glowing in the light of the gateway 
lamp, and voices breaking out against him and blaming Bruno. 

They were ready to fling him back into the Arno. 

He was shy, but he was brave. His heart sickened and his 
temples throbbed with horror of the unknown things that they 
would wreak upon him. But he lowered the load off his 
shoulders, and darted up the paved way into their midst. 

“ It is all untrue,” he panted to them. “ It was only forty 
francs, and Bruno had nothing to do with it, and the little 
Gesu of Perugino sent me the money for my own, and selfish 
it might be, I know, but that I have asked God, and beat me you 
may till I am dead, or put me in prison, as you say, but it was 
all my own, and my wooden Busignuolo is safe, and you can- 
not touch it, and ” 

A stroke of Nita’s fist sent him down on the ground. 

He was light and agile. He was on his feet in a second. 
All the wrongs and sufierings of his childhood blazed up like 
fire in him. He was a gentle little soul, and forgiving; but 
for once the blood burned within him into a furious pain. 

Stung and bruised and heated and blinded by the blows 
'that the woman rained on him, he sprang on her, struck her 
in the eyes with all his force, and, tearing himself out of the 
score of hands that clutched at him, slipped through his tor- 
mentors and fled down the slope. 


SJONA. 


135 


“ I will tell Bruno ! I will tell Bruno !” he sobbed as be 
went ; and while the women surrounded the screaming Nita, 
who shrieked that the little brute had blinded her for life, a 
solemn silence fell upon the men, who looked at Lippo. 
If Bruno were told, life would not pass smoothly at the 
Lastra. 

That minute of their hesitation gave the child time for his 
liberty. When Lippo and the barber pursued him, he was 
out of sight, running fast under the shadow of the outer walls, 
where all was silent in the dusk. 

“ This comes of doing good 1” groaned Lippo to the barber. 


CHAPTEB XIII. 

Sign A ran on under the walls where the men make ropes 
on the grass, but where it was all deserted now. 

He had never known what passion was before. He had 
borne all ill usage as his due. He had let himself be kicked 
and cuffed as a gentle little spaniel does, only looking up with 
wistful eyes of sorrowful wonder. 

But now the fury of a sudden sense of unbearable wrong 
had boiled up in his veins and mastered him, and was hissing 
still in his ears and beating still in his brain. 

A sense of having done some great crime was heavy on him. 
He knew he had been very wicked. He could feel himself strik- 
ing, striking, striking, and the woman’s eyeballs under his 
hands. He might have killed her, for anything he knew. To 
his vivid little fancy and his great ignorance it seemed quite 
possible. And yet he had borne everything so long, and 
never said a word, and lain awake so many nights from pain 
of bruises. 

Could anybody be very angry with him for having lost his 
temper just this once ? 

Bruno would not, — that he knew. 

He heard the steps of Lippo and the barber and the mut- 
terings of their voices pursuing him. He ran as if he had 


136 


SIGNA. 


wings. A great vague terror of hideous punishment lent him 
the speed of a gazehound. He doubled the walls at head- 
long speed, his bare feet scarcely touching the ground, and 
darted in at the door of old Teresina’s dwelling in the western 
gateway. By heaven’s mercy she had not drawn the bolt. 

The old woman was in her short kirtle, with the handker- 
chief off her gray knot of hair, getting ready for going to bed, 
with one little lamp burning under a paper picture of the Na- 
tivity. 

Signa ran to her, tumbling over the spinning-wheel and the 
dozing cat and the huge brown moon-like loaf of bread. 

“ Oh, dear Teresina, let me hide here !” he cried, in his ter- 
ror, clinging to her skirts. “ Lippo is after me. They are so 
angry about the violin, and I have hurt Nita very much because 
she knocked me down. Hide me — hide me quick, or they will 
kill me, or give me to the guards !” 

Old Teresina needed no twice telling. She opened the big 
black coffer with the illuminated figures, where she had hidden 
the violin, and motioned the child to follow it. The coffer 
would have sheltered a man. 

She left the lid a little ajar, and Signa laid himself down at 
the bottom with the Old World smell of incense and spiced 
woods. His wooden Rusignuolo was safe ; he kissed it, and 
clasped it to him. After all, what did anything matter, if only 
they would leave that to him in peace ? 

“ Lie still till they have been here to ask for you,” said Tere- 
sina ; and she tied her handkerchief over her head again and 
began to spin. 

In a few minutes there was rapping on her door. 

Teresina put her head out of the window, and called to know 
who was there. 

“ It is I — Lippo,” a voice called up to her in answer. “ Is 
the little devil with you ? We have loved him as our own, and 
now he has half murdered Nita, — Nita that fed him from her 
bosom and treated him inch for inch like Toto all these years ! 
Here is Momo : he will tell you. Is the boy with you ?” 

“ I have not seen him all day,” said Teresina. “ I thought 
he was on the hills. Come up, good Lippo, and look, and tell 
me more. The child has a sweet pipe, but heaven only knows 
where the devil may not lurk. Come up, Lippo, and tell me all. 
You make me tremble.” 


SIGN A. 137 

“You work late, mother,” said Lippo, suspiciously, tum- 
bling up the stairs into the chamber. 

“Ay. Lisa’s bridal is on St. Anne’s day, and there is next 
to no sheeting. A grandame must do what she can for the 
dower. But tell me all, — all, — quick, dear ! How white you 
look, the saints keep us !” 

“ White ! With a little viper nurtured nine years stinging 
you, and a dear good wife blind, I daresay, for life, who would 
not be white ?” wept Lippo, glancing sharply through the 
shadows of the room. “And of course you must have heard, — 
two hundred francs and a beastly fiddle ! and it is enough to 
bring the judgment of Holy Church ” 

“ I have heard nothing,” said Teresina, with her hands up- 
lifted in amaze. “ Sit down and tell me, Lippo, and Momo 
too; you look ready to drop, both of you. Two hundred 
francs ! Gesu ! why, it would buy up the whole of the town ! 
And a fiddle ! — ah, now I think of it, the dear naughty little 
lad was always sighing for an old thing in Tonino’s window 
that he had played on once.” 

“ If I could find him or it, I would break it in shivers over 
his head,” said Lippo, forgetting his saintly savor. “ I am a 
meek man, as you know, and a merciful, and never say a harsh 
word to a dog ; but my dear wife blind, and all that money 
squandered, and Bruno, if that little beast is gone to him, ready 
to smash every bone in my body ! It is horrible !” 

“ Horrible, truly,” gasped Teresina. “It is like a green 
apple to set one’s teeth on edge. But tell me the tale clear ; 
how is one to understand ?” 

They told her the tale, both in the same breath, with every 
ornament that imagination and indignation could lavish on it : 
death may be imminent, time may be money, a moment lost 
may mean ruin or murder or a house devoured by flames ; but, 
all the same, Lippo and all his countrypeople will stop to tell 
their tale. Let Heath’s scythe fall or Time’s sands run out, 
they must stand still and tell their tale. 

The story-tellers of the Decamerone are true to nationality 
and nature. 

And while they told it, Teresina trimmed fresh her lamp, 
and made the wick burn so brightly that there was not a nook 
or cranny of the little place in which a mouse could have been 
hidden unseen. 


12 * 


138 


SIGNA. 


“But you never will go after him to Bruno’s,” she said, 
when the narrative was done, and all her horror poured out at 
it in strongest sympathy. “ The child is half-way there by this 
time, and Bruno takes part with him right or wrong, — you best 
know why, — and he is so violent ; and at night, too, on that 
lonely hill ; there might be mischief.” 

“Ay, there might,” said Momo, with a quaking in his voice. 
She knew her men; 

“No fear of that,” said Lippo, with a boast ; “ Bruno is 
fierce, we all know his fault, — dear fellow, the saints change 
his heart ! But with me, — oh, never with me.” 

“ For all that, he shook you once, many years ago, when 
you beat the child all in justice and good meaning, — shook 
you as a big dog does a little one,” said Teresina, with a nod 
of her head and a twinkle in her eyes. “ I would not go nigh 
him, not to-night ; you must think of your good Nita and all 
those children. With the morning you will be cool, both of 
you. But Bruno on that hill, in the dark, — I should not care 
to face him, not on ill terms. You have your family, Lippo.” 

“ But if we leave it till the morning ” 

“ Well, what harm can come ? The child’s sin is the same, 
and Nita can have law on him ; and about the money, Bruno, 
of course, must hear reason, and give up the fiddle, and let you 
get the whole sum back. Tonino would see the justice of that : 
you have reared and roofed the child ; all his is yours, — that 
is fair right. But if you cross Bruno, of a sudden, in the 
night ” 

“ There is reason in what you say, mother,” assented Lippo, 
whose heart was hammering against his ribs in mortal terror 
of confronting Bruno. 

And after a little while he went, glad of an excuse to veil 
his fears from the .loquacious barber. 

“ Tell Nita I shall see her in the morning, and how sorry I 
am, because I loved the lad’s little pipe, and never thought he 
had such evil in him,” said Teresina, opening her door to call 
the valediction after them down the stairway. Then she came 
and opened the lid of the cofier. 

“ He is gone now. Jump out, little one.” 

“ Oh, why did you keep him?” cried Signa, looking up as if 
he were in his coffin. “ I thought he never would go, and I was 
BO afraid. And have I hurt her so much as that, do you think ?” 


SIGNA. 


139 


“As if your little fists could bruise a big cow like Nita ! — 
what folly ! I kept him to send him away more surely. When 
you want to get rid of a man, press him to stay ; and if you 
have anything you need to hide, light two candles instead of 
one. No, you have never hurt Nita. Take my word, she is 
eating an onion supper this minute. But there will be trouble 
when Bruno knows ; that I do fear.” 

Signa sat up in the coffer, holding the violin to his chest 
with two hands. 

“ Am I a trouble to Bruno ?” he said, thoughtfully. 

“ Well, I should think so ; 1 am not sure. The brothers 
are always quarreling about you. There is something under- 
neath. You have never complained to Bruno ?” 

“ No. Giorgio told me Bruno might kill Lippo if I did, and 
then they would hurt Bruno, — send him to the galleys all his 
life ; so Giorgio said.” 

“ Like enough,” muttered Teresina. “ But you cannot hide 
this, little one. All the Lastra will talk about it.” 

“And there will be harm for Bruno?” 

“ He will be violent, I dare say : he always is. Bruno does 
not understand soft answers, and Lippo is all in the wrong ; 
and then, of course, Bruno must learn at last how they have 
treated you. It will be a pasticcio.'' 

Teresina sat down on her wooden chair, and twitched the 
kerchief off her head, again perplexed and sorrowful. To make 
a pasticcio — a bad pasty — is the acme of woe and trouble to 
her nation. 

“ Can I do anything ?” said Signa, wistfully, sitting still in 
the open coffer. 

“ No, not that I see, — unless you could put yourself out of 
the world,” said the old woman, not meaning anything in par- 
ticular, but only the utter hopelessness of the matter in her 
eyes. 

Signa looked up in silence ; he did not miss a word. 

“ No, there is nothing to be done,” said Teresina, in anxious 
meditation. “ Bruno will get into trouble about you. I have 
always thought he would. But that is not your fault, poor 

little soul ! There is something Lippo is a fox. He 

plays his cards well, but what his game has been nobody 
knows. Perhaps he has made a mistake now. Bruno must 
know they have ill used you. That comes of this money. 


140 


SIGNA. 


Money is god and devil. Why could that painter go and give 
you gold ? — a bit of a thing like you. Any other man than 
Bruno would have put it by to buy you your coat for your first 
communion. But that was always Bruno, — one hand on his 
knife and the other scattering gifts. For my part, I think 
Bruno the better man of the two, but no one else does. Yes ; 
there must be trouble. Bruno will break his brother’s head, 
and Lippo will have law on him. You might go to Tonino 
and get him to take the fiddle back ; but then it was only forty 
francs, and Lippo will always scream for the two hundred that 
the fools have chattered about : that would be no good. Oh, 
Bio mio ! if only that angel at the Certosa had not sent you 
anything. Angels stand aloof so many years, and then they 
put their finger in the dough and spoil the baking. May they 
forgive me up above ! I am an ignorant old woman, but if they 
would only answer prayer a little quicker or else not at all. I 
speak with all respect. My child, sleep here to-night, and be 
off at dawn to Bruno. Sleep on it. Oet up while it is gray, 
to have the start of Lippo and his people. But sleep here. 
There is a bit of grass matting that will serve you, — there, 
where the cat is gone. And 1 will get you a drop to drink 
and a bit of bread, for tired you must be and shaken ; and 
what the Lastra see in Lippo to make a saint of baffles me, — ■ 
a white-livered coward and a self-seeker. He will die rich ; 
see if he do not die rich ! he will have a podere, and keep his 
baraccino, I will warrant, before all is done !” 

She brought the child the little glass of red wine, and a big 
crust ; he drank the wine, — he could not eat, — and lay down 
as she told him by the cat upon the matting. He was so un- 
happy for Bruno ; the B,usignuolo scarcely comforted him, only 
every now and then he would stretch out his hand and touch 
it, and make sure that it was there ; and so fell asleep, as chil- 
dren will, be they ever so sorrowful. 

He woke while it was still dark, from long habit, but the old 
woman was already astir. She made him take a roll and a 
slice of melon, as she opened her wooden shutter and looked 
out on to the little acacia-trees below, and the big mountain, 
that was as yet gray and dark. 

“ Get you up the hill, dear, to Bruno, and out of the house 
before the men are about underneath with the straw,” she said 
to - him, “ and I do not know what you can say ; and I mis- 


SIGN A. 


141 


doubt there will be ill words and bad blows ; and it has been 
said for many a year that Bruno would end his days at the 
galleys. I remember his striking his sister once at the wine- 
fair in Prato, — such a scene as there was, — and the blood 
spoiled her bran-new yellow bodice, that was fit for the Blessed 
Mary, — speaking with all respect. There is Grian undoing his 
big doors below : every place is full of grain now. Run, run, 
dear little fellow, and the saints be with you, and do not forget 
that they love a peacemaker ; though, for the matter of that, 
we folks are not like them, — we love a feud and a fight, and 
we will prick our best friend with a pin rather than have dull 
times and no quarrel. Run off, quick, and take the melon 
with you.” 

He did as she told him, and ran away. She watched him 
from the little square window over the carnation-pots. She 
was a good old soul, but she could not help a thrill of longing 
to see how Bruno would come down into the Lastra like a 
brown bull gored and furious. 

“ Only the one that is in the right always gets the worst of 
it,” thought Teresina (who had seen her eighty years of life), 
as the last star died out of the skies, and she turned from the 
lattice to scrub out her pipkins and pans, and fill her copper 
pitcher with water, and sweep the ants away with her reed be- 
som, and then sat down to spin on at Lisa’s bridal sheeting, 
glancing now and then at the mountain and wondering what 
would happen. 

What would happen ? 

That was what tortured the little beating heart of Signa, as 
he ran out into the lonely cold darkness of the dawn, as the 
chimes of the clocks told four in the morning. He held his 
slice of melon and bread in one hand, and clasped the violin 
and its bow close to him with the other. A terrible sense of 
guilt, of uselessness, of injury to others, weighed on him. 

Even Teresina, who was fond of him, had confessed that he 
was a burden to Bruno, and a cause for strife at all times, and 
no better. Even Teresina, who was so good to him, had said 
that lie could do nothing unless he could get himself out of the 
world. 

The words pursued him with a sense that the old woman 
would have bitten her tongue through rather than have con- 
veyed into the child’s mind, — a sense of being wanted by no 


142 


SIGN A. 


one, useful to no one, undesirable and wearisome, and alto- 
gether out of place in creation. 

He was old enough to feel it sharply, and not old enough to 
measure it rightly. Besides, Nita and Toto and all of them 
had told him the same thing ten thousand times : what was 
said so often by so many must be true. 

To kill himself never entered his thoughts. The absolute 
despair which makes life loathsome cannot touch a child. 

But he did think of running away, hiding, etfacing himself ; 
as a little hare tries to do when the hounds are after it. 

He would go away, he thought ; it was his duty ; it was the 
only thing he could do to serve Bruno ; and he was so ashamed 
of himself, and so sorrowful, and perhaps people might be kind 
to him on the other side of the mountains, where the sun came 
from ; perhaps they might, — when they heard the B.usignuolo. 

Other boys decide to run away from love of adventure, or 
weariness of discipline ; but he resolved to go away because he 
was a burden, and brought wild words between two brothers, 
and was good for nothing else. 

The “ curse of granted prayer” lay heavy on his young 
frightened soul. The thing he had desired was with him ; the 
thing which he had thought would be sweeter than food or 
friends or home or anything ; and yet his feet were weary and 
his heart was sick from the war which it had brought upon 
him. 

“Still it is mine, — really mine,” he thought, with a thrill 
of joy which nothing could wholly stifle in him, as his hand 
wandered over its strings and drew out of them little soft, sigh- 
ing murmurs like the pipe of waking birds. 

He was quite resolved to run away ; down into Florence, he 
thought, and then over to where the sunrise was ; of the west 
he was afraid, — the sea was there, that he heard terrible things 
of on winter evenings, and the west always devoured the sun, 
and he supposed it was always night there. 

“ I will just bid Gremma good-by, just once,” he thought, 
running on stumbling and not seeing his way, because his eyes 
were so brimming with tears. But sight did not matter much. 
He could find his way about quite safely in the darkest night. 
The gates of the great gardens were open, for the laborers 
were already at work there, and he ran into the shadowy dew- 
wet place looking for her. If he could find her without going 


SIONA. 


143 


to the cottage, he thought, it would be best, because her 
father might have heard, and might detain him, thinking to 
please Bruno. 

He was not long before he saw her, out of bed at daybreak, 
as birds are out of their nests ; lying on her back in the wet 
grass by the marble pond, where the red Egyptian rushes 
were in flower, and munching the last atom of a hard black 
crust which had been given her for her breakfast, while the big 
water-lilies still were shut up, and the toads were hobbling 
home to their dwellings in the bottom of the tank. Gremma 
was one of those beautiful children who, in the land of Rafiaelle, 
are not a fable. As they grow older they lose their beauty 
almost always. But the few people who saw her thought that 
she would never lose hers. 

No doubt there was some strain in her from the old Goth 
or German races from the times when Totila had tramped with 
his warriors over the ravaged valleys, or Otho swooped down 
like a hawk into the plains. 

She was brilliantly fair ; as she lay now on the grass, on her 
back, with her knees drawn up and her rosy toes curled up 
and her arms above her head, she shone in the sun like a pearl, 
and her face might have come out of Botticelli’s chair, with 
its little scarlet mouth and its wonderful rosy bloom, and its 
mass of lighted golden hair cut short to the throat, but falling 
over the forehead. 

“ Gemma, I have brought you some breakfast,” he said to 
the pretty little child. She threw her arms round his neck, 
and set her pearly teeth into the melon. The bread followed. 
When she had done both, she touched his cheek with her 
finger. 

“ Why are you crying?” 

“ Because I am no use to any one. Because I bring trouble 
on everybody.” 

Gemma surveyed him with calm, serious eyes. 

“ You bring me good things to eat.” 

That was his use ; in her eyes there could be no better. 

The tears fell down Signa’s face; he sobbed under his 
breath, and kissed Gemma’s light curling locks with a sorrow 
and force in his lips that she did not understand. 

“ I think I will go away. Gemma,” he said, with a sort of 
desperate resolve. 


144 


SIGNA. 


G-emma, who was not easily excited, surveyed him with her 
blue eyes seriously as before. 

“Where?” 

“ I do not know.” 

“ That is silly.” 

Gremraa was a year younger than he. But she was not 
vague as he was, nor did she ever dream. 

“ I will go away,, I and the Rusignuolo,” said Signa, with 
a sob in his throat. “ It is the only way to be no burden, — 
to make peace.” 

Gemma pushed a lizard with her little rosy toes. 

“ Mimi does not bring me so much fruit as you do,” she 
said, thoughtfully. Mimi was a neighbor’s son, who was nine 
years old, and worshiped her, and brought her such green 
plums and unripe apples as his father’s few rickety trees would 
yield by windfalls. She was wondering how it would be with 
her if she were left to Mimi only. 

“ Perhaps I will get you beautiful golden fruit where I go,” 
said Signa, who always unconsciously fell into figures and 
tropes. “ The signore in the monastery said my mouth would 
drop pearls. I have seen pearls, — beautiful white beads that 
the ladies wear. They are on the goldsmiths’ bridge in the 
city. When my lips make them you shall have them round 
your curls. Gemma, and on your throat, and on your arms : 
how pretty you will be !” 

He was smiling through his tears, and kissing her. Gemrna 
listened. 

“With a gold cross like Bcei’s?” she said, breathlessly. 
Bcei was a rich contadina who had such a necklace, a string 
of pearls with a gold cross, which she wore on very high feasts 
and sacred anniversaries. 

“ Just likeJBcei’s,” said Signa, thinking of his own woe and 
answering to please her. 

Gemma reflected, pushing her little foot against the wet 
gravel in lines and circles. 

“ Run away, at once !” said she, suddenly, with a little shout 
that sent the lizards scampering. 

“ Oh, Gemma !” Signa felt a sting, as if a wasp had pierced 
him. Gemma loved him no more than this. 

“Run away, directly I” said the little child, with a stamp 
of her foot, like a baby empress. 


SIONA. 


145 


“ To get you the pearls ?” 

Gemma nodded. 

Signa sat still, thinking ; his tears fell ; his eyes watched a 
blue-and-gray butterfly in the white bells of the aloe-flower. 
He could not be utterly unhappy, because he had the violin. 
If it had not been for that 

“ Why do you not go ?” said the little child, fretfully, with 
the early sunbeams all about her little yellow head in a nimbus 
of light. 

Signa got up ; he was very pale ; his great brown eyes swam 
in a mist of tears. 

“-Well, I will go. I have got the Rusignuolo. . Perhaps it 
is not true what the signore said ; but I will go and see. If 
I can get pearls, — or anything that is good, — then I will come 
back, and the Lastra will be glad of me, and I will give every- 
thing to the Lastra, and to Bruno and you. Only, to go 
away, — it will kill me, I think. But if I do die, I shall be 
no burden any more then on any one. And if the signore 
spoke truth, and I am worth anything, then I will be great. 
When I am a man I will come back and live here always, 
because no place can be ever so beautiful ; and I will make new 
gates, all of beaten gold ; and I will build the walls up where 
they are broken ; and I will give corn and wine in plenty 
everywhere, and there shall be beautiful singing all the night 
and day, and music in all the people’s homes, and we will go 
out through the fields every morning praising God ; and then 
Signa will not be old or forgotten any more, but all the world 
will hear of her.” 

And he went, not looking back once at the rushes and the 
water-lily and the little child ; seeing only his own visions, and 
believing them, — as children and poets will. 

But Gemma, pausing a moment, ran after him. 

“ Take me, too !” 

“ Take you — away ?” 

“ Yes. I want to go too.” 

Signa kissed her with delight. 

“You are so fond of me — as that ?” 

“ Oh, yes ; and I am so tired of black bread, and Mimi’s 
plums are always green.” 

Signa put her away a little sadly. 

“ You must not come. There is your father.” 

Q 13 


146 


SIQNA. 


“ Yes, I will come. I want to see what you will see.” 

“ But if you should be unhappy ?” 

“ I will come back again.” 

Signa wavered. He longed for his playmate. But he knew 
that she wished a wrong thing. 

“ I cannot take you,” he said, with a sigh. “ It would be 
wicked. Palma would cry all the day long. Besides, I am 
nothing ; nobody wants me. I go to spare Bruno pain and 
trouble ; that is different. But you, Gemma, all of them love 
you.” 

“ Let us go,” said Gemma, putting her hand into his. 

“ But I dare not' take you !” 

“ You do not take me,” said Gemma, with a roguish smile, 
and the sophism of a woman grown. “ You do not take me. 
I go.” 

“ But why ? Because you love me ?” 

Gemma ruffled her golden locks. 

“ Because they give me nothing to eat.” 

“ They give you as much as they have themselves.” 

“ Ah, but you will give me more than you have,” said 
Gemma, with the external foolishness and internal logic of 
female speech. 

Signa put her away with a sigh. 

“ Perhaps I shall have nothing. Gemma. Do not come.” 

Gemma stopped to think. 

“ You always get something for me,” she said, at last. 
“ Take me, — or I will go and tell Bruno.” 

Signa hesitated, and succumbed to the stronger will and the 
resolute selfishness of the little child : they are more often 
feminine advantages than the world allows. 

“You will be angry with me. Gemma, in a day, if I let you 
have your way,” he said, hanging his head in sad perplexity. 

Gemma laughed ; she was so pretty when she laughed ; Fra 
Angelico would have delighted to paint her so. 

“ When I am angry, I am not dull,” she said, with much 
foresight for her own diversion. “ The boys slap me back 
again. But you never do. Let us go, — or I will run up and 
tell Bruno.” 

“ Come, then,” said Signa, with a sigh : he knew that she 
would do what she said. Gemma, nine years old, was already 
a woman in many ways, and had already found out that a de- 


SIONA. 147 

termination to please herself and to heed no one else’s pleasure 
was the only royal road to comfort in earthly life. 

And she was resolved to go ; already she had settled with 
herself what she would make Signa do, shaping out her pro- 
jects clearly in the sturdy little brain that lived under her 
amber curls. 

She was thought a beautiful child, but stupid ; people were 
wrong. 

Gemma lying doing nothing under a laurel-bush, with her 
angelic little face, and her stubborn refusal to learn to read, or 
learn to plait, or learn to spin, or learn to do anything, was as 
shrewd as a little fox cub for her own enjoyments and appe- 
tites. She lay in the sun, and Palma did the work. 

“We will go to Prato,” said Gemma, all smiles now that 
her point was gained. 

“ I thought — Florence,” said Signa, who, in his own 
thoughts, had resolved to go there. 

“ Ch6 !” said Gemma, with calm scorn. “ Boys never think. 
You would meet Bruno on the road. It is Friday.” 

Friday is the market-day, when all fattori and contadini 
having any green stuff to sell, or grain to chaffer for, or ac- 
counts to settle with, meet in the scorch of the sun, or in the 
teeth of the north wind, in face of Orcagna’s Loggia ; a 
weather-worn, stalwart, breezy, loquacious crowd, with eyes 
that smile like sunny waters, and rough cloaks tossed over one 
shoulder, and keen lips at close bargains either with foe or 
friend. 

“And there is a fair at Prato,” said Gemma. “I heard 
them saying so at the mill-house, when I took Babbo’s grain.” 

“But what have we to do with a fair? ” said Signa, whose 
heart was half broken. 

Gemma smiled till her little red pomegranate bud of a 
mouth showed all her teeth, but she did not answer him. 
She knew wdiat they would have to do with it. But he — he 
was dreaming of gates of inlaid gold for the Lastra. 

What was the use of talking any sense to him ? He was 
so foolish : so Gemma thought. 

“Prato goes out, — to the world,” she said, not knowing 
very well what she meant, but feeling that an indefiniteness 
of speech was best suited to this dreamer with whom she had 
to do. “ And if you want to get away you must go there at 


148 


SIGNA. 


once, or you will have Bruno or Lippo coming on you, and 
then there will be murder ; so you say. Come. Let us run 
across the bridge while we can. There is nobody here. Come 
— run.” 

“ Come, then,” said Signa, under his breath, for it frightened 
him. But Gremma was not frightened at all. 

It was now five. 

The great western mountain had caught the radiance of the 
morning shining on it from the opposite mountains, and was 
many-colored as an opal ; the moon was blazing like a globe of 
phosphorus : the east was warm still with rosy light, while all 
above them, hills and fields and woods and river and town, 
was bathed in that full clear light, that coldness of deep dew, 
that freshness of stirring wind, that make the earth as young 
at every summer sunrise in the south, as though Eos and 
Dionysius were not dead with all the fancies and the faiths 
of men, and in their stead Strauss and Hegel reigning twin 
godhead of the dreary day. 

She took his hand and ran with him. 

Signa’s tears fell fast, and his face was very pale ; he kept 
looking back over his shoulder at each yard ; but the little 
child laughed as she ran at topmost speed on her little bare 
toes, dragging him after her down the piece of road to the 
bridge, and across the bridge, and so on to the hillside. 

“ I know Prato is the other way of the mountains,” said 
Gemma, who had more practical shrewdness in her little rosy 
finger than Signa in all his mind and body. “ I have seen 
the people go to the markets and fairs, and they always go up 
here, — up, up, — and then over.” 

Signa hardly heard. He ran with her because she had 
tight hold of his hand ; but he was looking back at the gates 
of the Lastra. 

No one said anything to them. On the north side of the 
bridge no one had heard the tedious story, and if they had, 
would not have had leisure to say anything, because it was 
threshing-time, and everybody was busy in one way or another 
with the corn, — piling it on the wagons, driving the oxen out 
to the fields for it, tossing it into the barns or the courtyards, 
banging the flails over it, or stacking the straw in ricks, with 
a long pole riven through each to stay the force of the hur- 
ricanes. 


SIGNA. 


149 


When the country-side is all yellow with reaped grain, or 
all purple with gathered grapes, Signa people would not have 
time to notice an emperor ; their hearts and souls are in their 
threshing-barns and wine-presses. When they are quiet again, 
and have nothing to do but to plait or to loiter, then they will 
make a mammoth out of a midge in the way of talk, as well 
as any gossipers going. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

There were many mules, and horses, and carts, and men, 
and women, and asses rattling out over the cross-roads from 
the many various villages and farms towards Prato. 

In the ways of the Lastra itself dust was rising as the 
noisy ramshackle barocciiii were pulled out of their stables 
and got ready with any poor beast that was at home. The 
cattle had all been driven over in strings the night before 
from every part of the country, lowing, whinnying, and bleat- 
ing as they went. 

The road over the hill was thick with dust and trampled 
with traffic as the children climbed it, and many a rope-har- 
nessed horse and crazy vehicle flew by them in a cloud of 
white powder, the driver shrieking, “ Via, via, via !” 

“ We shall be seen and stopped,” said Signa, shrinking 
back ; but Gemma pulled him onward. 

“ Nonsense !” she said, steadily. “ They do not think about 
us ; they think about themselves and the fair ; and what they 
will drink and eat, and how they will cheat.” 

Gemma dwelt under the lemon leaves of lonely Giovola ; 
but her experiences of life had been sufficient to tell her that 
when your neighbor is eating well and cheating comfortably he 
will usually let you alone. 

She would not let him go back ; she kept close hold of his 
hand, and trotted on her rosy, strong little feet that tired no 
more than do a mountain pony’s. 

She was right in her conclusions. The carts rattled by and 
no one took any notice of them. Two children running by 
the wayside were nothing uncommon, that any one should 

13 * 


150 


SIONA. 


remark on it and reflect about it ; and one or two people who 
did look at them and recognize them supposed that they were 
going somewhere on some errand for Sandro or for Bruno. 

They went along unmolested till the sun rose higher and 
the glittering heavy dews began to pass off from the earth 
as the day widened. 

They descended the hill and proceeded along the straight 
road of the plain ; the great line of the northern mountains 
unrolled before them in the morning light, with airy gray 
summits high in the clouds, and the lower spurs purple with 
shadow, and here and there the white gloom of a village 
dropped in a ravine, or of a little town shining at the foot of 
a bold scarp. Monte Morello rose the highest of all the 
heights, looking a blue, solemn, naked peak against the radiant 
sky, keeping the secrets of his green oak forests and his 
emerald snakes for such as have the will and strength to see 
him near. Beyond, in the distance, far behind the nearer 
range, were the fantastic slopes of the mountains by the sea,‘ 
that saw the flames of Shelley’s pyre rise on the solitary 
shore. They were of faint rose hue, and had a silvery light 
about them ; they seemed to him like domes and towers. 

“ Are those temples, do you think ?” he said, in an awed 
voice, to Gemma. 

Gemma looked, and put her finger in her mouth. 

“ Perhaps they are the tops of the big booths at the fair.” 

“ Oh, Gemma !” he said, with pained disgust, and would 
have loosened his hand, but she held it too close and tight. 

“ If they are booths, we shall get to them in time,” she said. 

“ I would rather they were temples, though we might never 
get to them,” said he, with heat and pain. 

“ That is silly,” said Gemma. 

What use were temples that one never gets to ? — or any 
temples, indeed ? Nobody ever fried in them, or made sweet- 
meats. 

That is what she thought to herself, but she did not say so 
aloud. He was so silly ; he never saw these things ; and she 
wished to keep him in good humor. 

In time they reached Poggio Caiano : they were used to run 
along dirty roads in the sun, and did not tire quickly. They 
could both of them run a dozen miles or more with very little 
fatigue, but it was now seven in the morning. 


SIGNA. 


151 


“ I am thirsty, ” said Gemma. “ I should like some milk. 
Ask for it.” 

There was a cottage by the side of the road, with wooden 
sheds and cackling hens, and bits of grass-land under shady 
mulberries. She saw two cows there. Signa hung back. 

“ We have nothing to buy it with, — nothing !” 

“ How helpless you are !” said Gemma, and she put her 
pretty golden head in at the cottage door. There was a brown, 
kindly-looking woman there, plucking dead pigeons. 

“ Dear mother,” said Gemma, coaxingly, “you look so good, 
could you give us just a little drop of water? We have been 
walking half the night. Father is gone to Prato with a string 
of donkeys to sell, and we are to meet him there, and we are 
so — oh, so thirsty !” 

“ Poor little souls !” said the woman, melted in a moment, 
for all Italians are kind in little things. “ My child, what a 
face you have — like the baby Jesus ! Step in here, and I will 
get you a draught of milk. Is that your brother ?” 

“ Yes,” said Gemma. 

“ Oh, Gemma ! to lie is so wicked I” murmured Signa, 
plucking at her ragged skirt. 

“Is it?” said Gemma, showing her pearly teeth; “then 
everybody is wicked, dear ; and the good God must have his 
hands full !” 

The woman brought them out two little wooden bowls of milk. 

Gemma drank from hers as thirstily and prettily as a little 
snake could do. Signa refused his. He said he did not wish 
for it. 

“ Perhaps you are hungry,” said the woman, and offered 
them two hunches of wholesome bread. 

Signa shook his head and put his hands behind his back. 

Gemma took both. 

“ You are so kind,” she said, winningly, “ and we are hun- 
gry. My brother is shy ; that is all.” 

“Poor little dear!” said the good housewife, won and 
touched, so that she brought out some figs as well. “ And you 
have been walking far ! and have so far still to go 1 Your 
father is cruel.” 

“ He is very poor,” said Gemma, sadly, “ and glad to get a 
copper driving the asses. We come from Scandicci, — a long 
way.” 


152 


SIGNA. 


And then she threw her arms around the woman prettily, 
and kissed her, and trotted on, hugging the bread and figs. 

The woman watched them out of sight. “ A sweet child,” 
she thought. “ If the good Madonna had only given me the 
like ! — ah me ! I would have thanked her day and night. 
The boy is handsome too, — but sulky. Poor babies ! it is 
very far to go.” And she called Gemma back and kissed her 
again, and gave her a little bit of money, being a soft-hearted 
soul and well-to-do herself. 

“Is it wicked to lie?” said Gemma to Signa, showing her 
white little teeth again. “ But look ! it does answer, you see !” 

“ I cannot talk to you. Gemma,” said the boy, wearily, “you 
are so wrong, you grieve me so.” 

Gemma laughed. 

“ And yet it is me you always want to kiss, — not Palma. 
Palma, who never tells a lie at all !” 

Signa colored. He knew that that was true. He went on 
silently, holding the Busignuolo close to him, and not giving 
his hand to Gemma any more. She did not try to take it : it 
was too far for him to turn back. 

They came to the royal gardens of the palace where once 
Bianca Capella reigned and was happy and studied her love- 
philtres and potions for death’s sleep. Some great gates stood 
ajar ; there was the green shade of trees and shadows of thick 
grass. 

“ Let us go in,” said Gemma ; and they went in, and she 
sat down on the turf and began to taste the sweetness of her 
figs. 

Signa stood by her, silent and sad. She was so wrong, and 
yet she was so pretty, and she could make him do the things 
he hated, and he was full of pain, because he had left the 
Lastra and the hills and went he knew not whither. 

“ What are you doing there, you little tramps ? Be ofi* with 
you !” cried one of the gardeners of the place, espying them. 

Gemma lifted to him her blue caressing eyes. 

“ Are we doing wi*ong ? Oh, deal signore, let us stop a 
little, — just a very little; we will not Stir from here; only we 
are so tired, so very tired, and in the road it is hot and dusty 
and the carts are so many !” 

The gardener looked at her and grumbled, and relented. 

“ If you do not stir you may stop a little while, — a very 


SIGNA. 


153 


little,” — ^he said, at last. “ Where have you come fron., you 
baby angel?” 

“ From Scandicci ; and we go to Prato.” 

The man lifted his hands in horror, — ^because Scandicci was 
a long, long way,- away upon the Greve water. 

“ From Scandicci ! Poor children ! Well, rest a little if 
you like.” 

And he left the gate open for them. 

“ Have you beautiful flowers here ?” said Gemma, softly 
glancing through the trees. “ I do love flowers 1” 

She did not care for a flower more than for a turnip, living 
among gardens always, as she had done. But she knew flowers 
went to market, like the butter and the eggs. 

“ Do you ? You are a flower yourself,” said the gardener, 
who had had three pretty children and lost them. “ What are 
you going to do, you and your brother?” 

“We are going to play in Prato. We have no father or 
mother. He makes the music, and I dance,” said Gemma, 
who, though without imagination of the finer sort, could ring 
the changes prettily in lying. 

“ Poor little things ! And what are your names ?” 

“ I am Bita ; and he is Paolo,” said Gemma. “ Do you 
think you could give me a flower — ^just one — to smell at as I 
go along?” 

“ I will see,” said the man, smiling. 

Signa stood by, mute, with a swelling heart. He knew that 
he ought to stop her in her falsehoods, but he was afraid to vex 
her and afraid to lose her. He listened, wounded and ashamed, 
and feeling himself a coward. 

“ Why do you do such things. Gemma?” he cried, piteously, 
as the gardener turned away. 

“ It is no use telling you, you are so silly,” said Gemma, and 
she ate fig after fig, lying on her back in the shade of the trees 
where once Bianca and Francesco had wandered when their 
love^ and the summer were at height, and where their spirits 
wander still at midnight, so the peasants say. 

In a little time the gardener returned, bringing with him a 
basket of cut flowers. 

“You may like to sell these in Prato,” he said to the child 
“ And you will find a peach or two at the bottom.” 

“ Oh, how good you are !” cried Gemma, springing up ; and 


154 


SIGNA. 


she kissed the flowers, and then the brown hand of the 
man. 

“ You have but a sulky companion, I fear,” said the gar- 
dener, glancing at the boy, who stood aloof. 

“ Oh, no ! he is only shy and tired. What is this great 
house ?” 

“ It is a palace.” 

Are there people in it ?” 

“ No. Only ghosts !” 

“ Ghosts of what?” 

“ Of a great wicked woman who lived here, and her lovers. 
She was a baker’s daughter, but she murdered many people, 
and got to be a duchess of Tuscany.” 

“ Did she murder them to be a duchess ?” 

“ They say so ; and to keep her secrets 1” 

Gemma opened wondering eyes. 

“And she walks here at night ?” 

“ By night ; not that I can say I have ever seen her myself.’ 

“ I should like to meet her.” 

“ Why?” 

“ Perhaps she would tell me how she did it.” 

The gardener stared, — then he laughed. 

“You pretty cherub! — if you have patience, and grow a 
woman, you will find out all that yourself.” 

“ Come away,” said Signa, and he dragged her out through 
the open gates. 

She turned to kiss her hand to the gardener. Signa dragged 
her on in hot haste. 

“A rude boy, that,” said the man, as he shut the gates on 
them. 

“ They are flowers worth five francs I” said Gemma, hugging 
her basket of roses ; “ and you think it is no use to tell lies ?” 

“ I think it is very vile and base.” 

“ Pooh I” said Gemma, and she danced along in the dust. 
She had got a basket worth five francs, bread and fruit enough 
for the day, and some copper pieces as well, — all by looking 
pretty and just telling a nice little lie or two. 

He seemed very helpless to her. He had got nothing. 

“ It is very hot walking,” she said, presently. 

“ Yes,” said Signa. “ But we are used to it, you and I.” 

“ I hate it, though.” 


SION A. 


155 


“ But we must do it if we want to get to Prato.” 

“ Must we?” 

She thought a few minutes, then looked behind her ; in the 
distance there was coming along a baroccino and an old white 
horse. 

Gremma gave a sudden cry of pain. 

“ What is it, Gemma dear?” cried Signa, melted in a mo- 
ment and catching her. 

“ I have twisted my foot on a stone. Oh, Signa, how it 
hurts I” 

She sat down on a log of wood that chanced to lie there, 
and rubbed her little dusty foot dolefully. Signa knelt down 
in the dust, and took the little wounded foot upon his knee 
and caressed it with fond words. He could see no hurt ; but 
then no one sees sprains or strains till they begin to swell. 

“ Oh, Signa, we never shall get on 1 It hurts me so !” she 
cried, and sobbed and moaned aloud. 

The cart stopped ; there were old people in it coming from 
the city itself, people who did not know them. 

“ Is there anything the matter ?” cried the old folks, seeing 
the little girl crying so bitterly. 

“ She has hurt herself,” said Signa. “ She has twisted her 
ankle, or something, and we go to Prato. Oh, Gemma, dear 
Gemma, is it so very bad?” 

Gemma answered by her sobbing. 

The old man and woman chattered together a little, then, 
seeing the children were so pretty and seemed so sad, told 
them there was room in the cart ; they themselves were going 
to Prato, — there were eight miles more to do ; the boy might 
lift the girl in if he liked. 

Gemma soon was borne up and seated between the two old 
people ; Signa was told that he might curl himself, if he would, 
on the rope foot-place of the baroccino, and did so. The white 
horse rattled onward. 

“ You are a pretty boy, too,” said the woman to Signa. 
“ Why do you not talk to one ?” 

“ I have nothing to say,” he murmured. 

He would not lie ; and he could not tell the truth without 
exposing Gemma’s pretty fables. 

“ You are more sulky than your sister : one would think it 
was your foot that had been hurt,” said the old woman. 


156 


SIGNA. 


It was the third time in half an hour that, through Gemma, 
he had been called sulky. He hung his head, and was mute, 
taking care that Gemma’s ankle should not be shaken as they 
went. 

The way seemed to him very long. 

He could see little, on account of the dust, which rose in 
large quantities along the road, for the weather was dry and 
the traffic to the fair was great. Now and then he saw the 
purple front of Monte Morello, and the towers of Prato lying 
underneath it, to the westward, and farther the dark quarried 
sides of the serpentine hills with the crimson gleam of jasper 
in the sun, and, much farther still, Pistoja; that was all. 

Signa took her foot between his hands, and held it tenderly, 
so that the jolting should not jar it more than he could help. 

Her sobs ceased little by little, and she chattered softly with 
the old driver, telling him that she was going to Prato to sell 
flowers, and her brother to make a few coins by playing if he 
could : they had no father and mother. She cried out a little 
now and then, when the cart went rougher than usual over 
a loose stone. 

“ Are you in such pain, dear ? Oh, if only I could bear it 
for you !” said Signa ; and the tears came in his eyes to think 
that she should suffer so much. 

“ It is better ; do not fret,” said Gemma, gravely ; and the 
old woman in the cart thought, “ What a sweet-tempered child 
it is, so anxious to be patient and not vex her brother !” For 
Gemma had the talent to get credit for all the virtues that she 
had not, — a talent which is of much more use than any rea,l 
possession of the virtues ever can be. 

The eight miles were very tedious and mournful even to 
Signa ; he was full of sorrows for her little bruised foot, and 
full of care for her future and his own, and full of reproach to 
himself for having let her come with him. 

“ Whatever will come of it, all is my fault,” he thought, 
tormenting himself whilst the white horse trotted wearily over 
the bad road, and the clouds of dust blew round them and 
obscured the green sunny valley and the shining Bisenzio 
river. 

Gemma, moaning a little now and then, leaned her curly 
head against the old woman’s knee, and before very long fell 
fast asleep, her long black lashes sweeping her rosy cheeks. 


SIGNA. 


157 


“ Tlie innocent lamb !” said the woman, tenderly, and cov- 
ered her face from the sun and from the flies. 

When the cart stopped at the south gate of Prato, the old 
woman woke Gemma softly. 

“ My pretty dear, we cannot get the things out without 
moving you, but if you will sit a bit in the shade by the wall 
there, we will take you up again in a minute, and put you 
where you like ; or maybe you will stay with us and have a 
taste of breakfast.” 

Her husband lifted Gemma with much care down upon 
the stones, and set her on a bench, Signa standing still beside 
her. 

“ What is to be done. Gemma ?” he said, with a piteous 
sigh. “ Tell these good people the truth, dear, and they will 
take care of you, and drive you back again to Giovoli, I am 
sure. As for me, it does not matter.” 

“You are a grulloV^ said Gemma, with calm contempt, 
which meant in her tongue that he was as foolish a thing as 
lived. “ Wait till they are not looking, then do what I do.” 

Soon the man and woman had their backs turned, and were 
intent on their cackling poultry and strings of sausages. 

“ Now !” said Gemma, and she darted round a corner of the 
gate, and ran swiftly as a young hare down the narrow street, 
clasping her flower-basket close to her all the while. 

“ But you are not lame at all !” cried Signa, stupefled, when 
at length, panting and laughing, she paused in her flight. 

Her azure eyes glanced over him with a smile of intense 
amusement. 

“ Lame ! of course not ! But we wanted a lift. I got it. 
That was all.” 

“ Oh, Gemma !” 

He felt stunned and sick. He could only look at her. He 
could not speak. He thought the very stones of the street 
would open and swallow her for such wickedness as this. 

Gemma laughed the more to see his face. She could not 
perceive anything amiss in what she had done. It had been 
fun to see the people's anxiety for her ; and then they had 
been carried the eight miles they wanted : — how could any- 
thing be wrong that had so well succeeded ? 

Gemma, with her little plump bare shoulders and her ragged 
petticoat, reasoned as the big world does : — Success never sins. 

14 


158 


SIGNA. 


Signa could not laugh. lie. would not answer her. He felt 
wretched. 

“ You are a kill-joy !” said Gemma, pettishly, and sat down 
on a door-step to tie up her flowers and consider what it would 
be best worth her while to do. 

She decided that it was of no use at all to consult him. He 
was full of silly scruples that grew naturally in him, as choke* 
grass in the earth. 


CHAPTER XV. 

As it chanced, that day Bruno heard nothing. He did not 
leave his fields, the week being the threshing-time, and he 
having a man to help him whom he had to pay, and being 
anxious to do all his grain and stack the straw entirely before 
the Sunday. And down in the Lastra, Lippo, whose courage 
though not his wrath had cooled, found excuse to go up to his 
sheep who were ailing, and got out of reach of his wife’s 
tongue, and spent the day in pondering how best he could com- 
pass the getting back the money without rousing the ire of his 
brother too hotly on his own person. He held Bruno by a chain 
indeed, but he had a foreboding that under too severe a strain 
the chain would snap, and he repented him of the impolitic 
passion into which his wife had hurried him : nine years of 
prudence and hypocrisy had been undone in five minutes’ rage 1 

It was eight in the evening. There was red still in the sky, 
but the sun had gone down. Bruno had set a torch in the 
ring in the wall of his stone stable, and was still threshing by 
its light with the peasant whom he had hired to help him. 
Unless they worked late and early there could be no chance of 
finishing the grain by the Sunday morning ; and he wanted it 
threshed and done with, that he might have all his time for 
his maize and vines, and begin the plowing forthwith. 

The ruddy light gleamed on and ofiT ; the flails rose and fell ; 
the floor was golden ; the walls were black ; the air blew in, 
fragrant with the smell of the meadow-mint in the fields, and 
the jessamine that clung to the arched doors, and the stone- 
pines that dropped their cones on the grasa above whefe the 
hill was rock. 


SION A. 


159 


Bruno was very tired and hot ; he had worked all day on a 
drink of sharp wine from four of the morning, and had only 
stretched himself on the bench for an hour’s sleep at noon. 
Nevertheless he went on belaboring the corn with all his will, 
and in the noise of the flail and the buzz of the chafi’ about his 
ears he never heard a voice calling from outside, coming up 
the flelds ; and a child was standing at his side before he knew 
that any one was there. 

Then he left off, and saw Palma, Gremma’s sister. 

“ Do not come lounging here. You will get a blow of the 
flail,” he said, roughly. 

“ Signa !” panted Palma, who was crying. She had been 
crying all the way up the hill. 

“ If you want the boy, he is in the Lastra. Get out of the way.” 

“Is he not here? We were sure they were here,” said 
Palma, with a sob, knee-deep in the tossing straw. 

“ No,” said Bruno, whirling his flail about his head. “ Be 
off with you ! I can have no brats idling here.” 

“ But Signa is lost, and Gemma was with him !” said Palma, 
with wide-open black eyes of abject terror. 

“ Lost ! What do you mean ? The boy is somewhere in 
the Lastra, doing Lippo’s work.” 

“ No,” said Palma, with a sob. “ They were in the garden 
at Giovoli — very early — Mimo saw them — and they went away 
together — ^very fast — over the bridge. And Babbo sent me 
to ask you — he was sure that they were here. But old Tere- 
sina says that Signa must have run away, because Lippo and 
Nita beat him horribly — about a Addle — I do not know — and 
all the town is talking because Signa hit Nita in the eyes ; and 
I know she was cruel to him always, only he never, never 
would tell us.” 

Bruno flung down his flail with an oath that made the little 
girl tremble where she stood in the gold of the corn. 

“Stay till I come, Neo,” he said quickly to the contadino 
working with him, and caught his cloak from a nail, and, with- 
out another word or a glance at the sobbing child, strode away 
through his vines in the twilight. 

Palma ran with him on her sturdy little legs, telling him 
all she knew, which was the same thing over and over again. 
Bruno heard in unbroken silence. 

His long stride and the child’s rapid little trot kept them 


160 


SIGN A. 


even, and took them fast into the road and on to the bridge. 
At the entrance of this bridge Sandro met them : though the 
children were always together, Sandro knew little of Bruno, 
and was afraid of the little he did know. But the common 
bond of their trouble made them friends. He seized hold of 
Bruno as he went on to the bridge : 

“ Do not waste time in the Lastra. He is not in the Las- 
tra. There was some horrid quarrel, — so they say. Nita 
knocked the boy down, — all about that fiddle and the quantity 
of money. The boy has run away, and my Gemma with him 
— my pretty little Gemma ! — and a minute ago there came in 
Nisio with his baroccino ; he has been to Prato, and he says 
he saw them there, and thought that we had sent them : there 
is a fair. You can see Nisio ; he is stopping at the wine-shop 
just across. That was at four in the day he saw them. The 
boy was playing. Will you go ? I do not see how I can go ; 
they will turn me away at Giovoli if I go ; all my carnations 
potting, and all my roses budding, — and then the goat is near 
her labor, and nothing but this child to see to her or to keep 
the boys in order ; and what the lad could take Gemma for, 
if he would run away, though she was only a trouble in the 
house, and a greedy poppet always, still ” 

Bruno, before half his words were done, was away over the 
bridge, and had reached the wine-shop, and had confronted 
Nisio, — Dionisio Biggo, a chandler and cheesemonger of the 
Lastra, who had a little bit of land out Prato way. 

“ You saw — the boy — in Prato ?” 

Nisio grinned. 

“ I saw Lippo’s foundling in Prato. Is that much to you? 
Nay, nay ! I meant no offense indeed. Only you are so soft 
upon the boy, — people will talk ! Yes, he was there, playing 
a fiddle in a crowd ; and the little girl of Sandro’s — the 
pretty white one — with him. Only a child’s freak, no doubt. 
I thought they were out there for a holiday ; else I would 
have spoken, and have brought them home. But they can 
take no harm.” 

Bruno left him also without a word, and went on his way 
as swiftly as the wind up to the house of Lippo. 

Old Baldo was working at a boot at his board before his 
door. Lippo, who had just come down from the hills, was 
standing idling and talking with his gossip the barber. His 


SIGNA, 


161 


wife was ironing linen in an attic under the roof, her eyes 
none the worse, though she had bound one up with a red 
handkerchief that she might make her moan with effect to 
the neighbors. 

Bruno’s hand fell like a sledge-hammer on his brother’s 
shoulder before Lippo knew that he was nigh. 

“ What did you do to the boy?” 

Lippo trembled, and his jaw fell. People came out of the 
other door-way. Old Baldo paused with his awl uplifted. 
Children came running to listen. Bruno shook his brother 
to and fro as the breeze shakes a cane by the river. 

“ What did you do to the boy?” 

“ I did nothing,” stammered Lippo. “ We were vexed, — 
all that money, and nothing but a fiddle to show. That was 
natural, you know, — only natural, was it not? And then the 
child grew in a dreadful passion, and he fiew on my poor good 
Nita like a little wild-cat, and blinded her, — she is blind now. 
That is all the truth, and the saints are my testimony !” 

“ That is a lie, and the devils are your sponsors !” shouted 
Bruno, till the shout rang from the gateway to the shrine. 
“ If harm have come to the child, I will break every bone in 
your body. I go to find him first ; then I will come back and 
deal with you.” 

He shook Lippo once more to and fro, and sent him reeling 
against the cobbler’s board, and scattered Baldo’s boots and 
shoes and tools and bits of leather right and left ; then, with- 
out looking backward or heeding the clamor he had raised, he 
dashed through the Lastra to get home, and fetch money, and 
find a horse. 

Old Baldo did not love his son-in-law. His daughter had 
been taken by Lippo’s handsome, soft, pensive face, and timid 
gentleness and suavity of ways, as rough, strong, fierce-tem- 
pered women often are ; and Baldo had let her have her way, 
though Lippo had brought nothing to the common purse. It 
was a bad marriage for Nita, the sole offspring of the old cob- 
bler, who owned the house he lived in, and let some floors of it, 
and was a warm man, all the Lastra said, with cozy little bits 
of money here and there, and morsels of land even, bought at 
bargains, and a shrewd head, and a still tongue ; so that he 
might be worth much more than even people fancied, where 
he sat stitching at his door, with a red cap and a pair of horn 
14 * 


162 


SIQNA. 


spectacles, and a wicked old tongue that could throw dirt with 
any man’s, or woman’s either. 

Lippo stood quivering, and almost weeping. 

“ So good as we have been !” he moaned. 

“ You white-livered cur !” swore old Baldo, who had been 
toppled off his stool, and was wiping the dirt off his gray head, 
and groping in the dark for his horn spectacles, with many 
oaths. “ You whining ass ! Your brother only serves you 
right. It is not for me to say so. It is ill work washing one’s 
foul linen in the town fountain. But if Bruno break your neck 
he will serve you right, — taking his money all these years, and 
starving his brat, and beating it — pah !” 

“And what would you have said if I had pampered it up 
with dainties ?” said Lippo, panting and shivering, and hoping 
to heaven Nita’s hands were in the starch, and her ears any- 
where than hearkening out of the window. 

“ That is neither here nor there,” said old Baldo, who, like 
all the world, detested the tu quoque form of argument. “ That 
is neither here nor there. Tha pasticcio was none of my mak- 
ing. I said there were too many brats in the house. But you 
have got good pickings out of it, that is certain ; and it is only 
a raging lion like Bruno, a frank fool, and a wrathful, and for- 
ever eating fire and being fleeced like a sheep, that would not 
have seen through you all these years.” 

Lippo upset the stall again by an excess of zeal in searching 
for the spectacles, and prayed the saints, who favored him, to 
serve him so that, in the noise of all the falling tools, his terrible 
father-in-law’s revelations might not reach the listening barber. 

Bage in, wit out : Lippo sighed to think that his lot fell for- 
ever among people who saw not the truth and wisdom of this 
saying. 

He found the spectacles, and then gathered himself together 
with a sigh. 

“ My brother shall not go alone to seek the boy,” he said, 
with gentle courage and a sigh. “ I thought the child was 

safe upon the hill, or else Harm me ? — oh, no ! Poor 

Bruno is a rough man ; but he owes me too much ; besides, 
he is not bad at heart, — oh, no ! Perhaps I was hasty about 
that money. After all, it was the child’s. But when people 
are poor, as we all are, and never taste meat hardly twice a 
year, and so much sickness and trouble everywhere, it over- 


SIONA. 


163 


comes one. So much money for a toy ! — for, after all, an old 
lute does as well. Tell Nita I am gone to look for Signa, and 
maybe out all night.” 

“ He is a good man, and it is a shame to treat him so,” said 
the women at the doors. 

Old Baldo picked up his waxed thread, and made a grimace 
to himself, as he went to his work again, with a lantern hung 
up above him on a nail. But it was not for him to show his 
daughter, or her husband, in the wrong. Besides,- popular 
feeling, so far as it was represented in the lane between the 
gateway and the shrine, was altogether with Lippo. 

He had struck a chord that was sure to answer. People who 
lived on black bread and cabbages, and had a good deal of 
sickness, and labored from red dawn to white moonlight to fill 
empty mouths, were all ready to resent with him the waste of 
gold pieces on a child and a fiddle. 

He knew the right key to turn to move his little world. 

Good man as he was, he went down the lane with an angry 
heart, saying, as old Vasari has it, things that are not in the 
mass ; but he said them to himself only ; for he had a char- 
acter to lose. 

Under the light of the lamp that jutted out from the east 
gateway, where the old portcullis hangs, he saw Bruno. He 
was putting a little, rough, short pony into a baroccino, having 
hired both from a vintner, whose tavern and stable were open 
on to the street. The baroccino was the common union of rope 
and bars and rotten wood and huge wheels, which looks as if 
it would be shivered at a step, but will in truth wheel unbroken 
over mountain heights and fly unsinking over a morass. The 
pony was one of those sturdy little beasts which, with a collar 
of bells and a head-dress of fox-tails, fed on straw and on blows, 
and on little else besides, will yet race over the country at that 
headlong yet sure-footed speed which Tuscans teach their cattle, 
heaven knows how. Bruno had hired both of the vintner, to 
save the time that his return home would have taken him. 

The street was quite dark. The lamp in the gateway shed a 
flickering gleam over Bruno’s dark face and the brass of the 
pony’s head-stall. 

Lippo’s heart stood still within him with fear. Neverthe- 
less, he went up to the place. He had a thing to say, and he 
knew he must say it then or never. 


164 


SIONA. 


“ Bruno, give me one word,” he said, in a whisper, touching 
his brother on the arm. 

Bruno flashed one glance on him, and went on buckling the 
straps of the harness. 

“Are you going to quarrel with me about the boy ?” 

“As God lives, I will kill you if harm come to him.” 

Lippo shivered. 

“ But if you find him safe and sound, — ^boys are always safe 
and sound, — do you mean to quarrel with me ? — do you mean 
to take him away ?” 

“ If you have dealt ill with him, it will be the worse for you.” 

Lippo knew the menace that was in his brother’s voice, 
though Bruno did not look up once, nor leave ofi* buckling and 
strapping. And he knew that he had dealt ill, — very ill. 

“ Listen, Bruno !” he said, coaxingly. “ He will tell you 
things, no doubt ; children always whine. We have punished 
him sometimes ; — one must punish children, or what would 
they be ? If you listen, he will tell you things, of course. 
Children want to live in clover, and never do a stroke of work.” 

Bruno freed his arm from his brother’s hand, with a gesture 
that sent the strap he was fastening backward up into Lippo’s 
face. 

“ You have hurt him, and you have lied, and you have be- 
trayed me and cheated me,” he said, between his teeth. “ I 
know that ! I know that ! Well, your reckoning will wait — 
till I have found the child.” 

Lippo’s blood ran very cold. Concealment, he saw, was 
impossible any longer. If the boy were found, he knew that 
he would have scant mercy to look for from Bruno’s hands. 

“ But hear a word, Bruno,” he said ; and his voice shook, 
and his fingers trembled as they clutched at Bruno’s cloak, 
as the latter took the ropes that served for reins and put his 
foot on the step of the little cart. “ Just a word, — just a word 
only. Will you take him away ? Will you cease to pay ? 
Will you break our compact? Is that what you mean ?” 

Bruno sprang on the baroccino, and answered with a slash 
of his whip across Lippo’s mouth. 

Lippo, stung with the pain of the blow, and goaded by a 
laugh that he caught from the vintner, who stood watching in 
his tavern door-way, sprang up also on the iron bar that serves 
as footboard to the little vehicle. 


SIGN A. 


165 


“ Take care what you do !” he hissed in his elder’s ear. 
“ Take care ! If you cease to pay, — if you take the child, — 
I will say what I said. I will make him hate you ; I will tell 
him who he is ; I will tell him how you stabbed his mother at 
the fair ; I will tell him how you — you — you left her alone 
dead for the flood to take her, and may-be had murdered her, 
for aught I know. And see how he will love you then, and 
eat your bread. Now strike me again if you like. That is 
what I shall say. And what can you do ? Tell me that ; 
tell me that ! Now go and ride out all the night, and think, 
and choose. How weak you are !— ah, ah ! How weak you 
are against me now ! — how weak, with all your rage!” 

Bruno struck him backward off the step. The pony dashed 
away into the darkness. Lippo fell in the dust. 

When the tearing noise of the wheels and the hoofs flying 
away into the night over the stones had died away, Lippo 
lifted his head to the vintner, who had raised him from the 
ground and had poured some wine into his mouth. 

“ Grood friend,” said gentle Lippo, with faltering breath, 
wiping the dust and a little blood from his forehead, “ good 
friend, say nothing of this : it would only bring trouble on 
Bruno. I would have gone with him to find the boy, but you 
saw what his passion was. He thinks me to blame ; perhaps 
I was. So much money thrown away on a toy of music for a 
child, when a pipe cut in the fields does as well, and it might 
have been laid aside for his manhood ! And so much want as 
there is in the world I But never mind that ; say I was wrong, 
— only do not tell people of Bruno. You know he is brawling 
always, and that gets him a bad name ; and not for paradise 
would I add to it. He is too quick with his hands, and will 
take life, I always fear, one day ; but this was an accident, — 
a pure accident only ! Oh, I am well, — quite well ; not hurt 
at all. And your wine is so pure and good.” 

And he drank a little more of it, and then went away home; 
and the vintner watched him, going feebly, as one bruised and 
shaken would do ; and shook his head, and said to three or 
four others who came in for a flask and a turn at dominoes, 
that that beast Bruno had wellnigh killed his brother and 
driven over him ; and that it would be well to give a hint of 
the story to the Carabineers when they should next come by 
looking after bad men and perilous tempers. 


166 


SIQNA. 


CHAPTER XVI. 

When he reached Prato it was quite night. Most of the 
houses were shut up ; but, as it had been a great fair-day, there 
were lights in many places, and little knots before wine-house 
doors, and groups coming and going to the sound of mandolins, 
laughing and romping about the old crooked streets. 

There was a bright moon above the old town where Fra 
]jippo once lived. The shadows of walls, and gables, and 
towers, and roofs, were black as jet. The women and youths 
danced on the pavement, while somebody strummed a guitar 
for them. There was a smell of spilt wine and dead flowers. 
Some mountebanks, in scarlet and blue and silvery spangles, 
were coming down a lane, having finished their night’s work, 
drum and fife sounding before them. 

Bruno saw nothing of all this. 

He only looked for a little, thin, pale face with big brown 
eyes as bright as stars. 

He stopped the pony before a little osteria that was open, 
because some men were still playing draughts and drinking in 
its doorway, and bid them put the beast in the stable, and 
asked them if they had seen a little boy and a girl somewhat 
younger, the boy having a fiddle with him, and long hair. 

The people did not know ; they had not noticed ; scores of 
children and country-folks had been about Prato all the day. 

Bruno left the pony and baroccino with them, and wandered 
out where chance took him. He had no acquaintance in Prato. 
He had only come there a few times to buy or sell, if there 
were a good chance to do either with profit. 

But he inquired of every creature he saw for the children. 

He asked the girls dancing. He asked the old man raking 
up the melon-rinds and fig-skins out of the dust. He asked 
the women barring up their casements for the night. He 
asked the lovers sauntering in the white, moon-lit midnight, 
with their arms round one another. He asked the dusky 
monk, flitting like a brown shadow from one arched doorway 
to another. But none could tell him anything ; nobody had 


SIQNA. 


167 


noticed ; some thought they had seen a little fellow with a violin, 
but were not sure ; one girl had, she knew, and had thought 
that he had played prettily, and remembered there had been a 
crowd about him ; but where the child had gone, had no idea. 

“He must be in the town,” thought Bruno, and looked for 
him in every nook of shadow, — under arches or on the steps 
of shrines, thinking to find them curled up asleep, like kittens 
after play. 

He tramped through and through the town, not staying for 
any rest or drink, footsore and heartsore, and putting away 
from him as best he could the dark perplexity of how he 
should tell the child the truth, without risking the loss of his 
affection ; or, keeping his secret, save the boy from Lippo. 

As he went pondering, with midnight tolling from the 
ancient bells above him, one of the mountebanks came to him 
down a dim passage-way, a rose-colored and gold-bedizened 
figure, skipping in the shadows with a mask on, and a bladder 
that it rattled. 

“ Are you looking for two children?” it said to him through 
its grotesque visage. “ I can tell you of them, — ^a little lad 
with a fiddle, and a pretty baby, white as a lily. They were 
here all day in Prato. And this evening Giovacchino, whom 
we call the Ape, took them both off with him to the sea. 
They went willingly ! — oh, they went willingly ! The Ape’s 
children always do ; only they never know what they go to ! 
Ho you understand ? The Ape has such a pretty cajolery 
with him. He would make the little Gesu off the very altars 
dance and play for him. But if you are their father, as I take 
it, follow them to Livorno : the Ape will take ship there at 
once. Follow them. For the Ape is — not so pleasant when 
children once are out of sight of shore. You understand I” 
And, singing, the mountebank, with his masked face grin- 
ning from ear to ear, rattling his peas in his gilded bladder, 
skipped away as he had come, too suddenly and swiftly for 
Bruno to stretch a hand to stay him. 

“ Is that true ?” cried Bruno, with a great gasp. He felt as 
if a strong hand had gripped his heart and stopped its beating. 

An old man, raking the fruit-skins that the revelers had left 
on the stones, looked up from his basket of filth. 

“ I dare say it is true,” said he. “ Why not? That man 
they call the Ape seeks pretty children, and catches some, and 


168 


SIQNA. 


takes them off to strange countries, to go about and play and 
dance, or sell the plaster casts, or grind the barrel-organs. I 
have heard of him. It is a trade, like any other. He always 
takes care that they go willingly. Still, if you be their father, 
and have no mind to lose them, best be off. He would be sure 
to go to sea at once.” 

“ The sea ! Where is the sea ?” said Bruno. 

He did not know, except that it was somewhere where the 
sun went every night. 

“Go to Livorno. They have gone to Livorno safe enough. 
The Ape will be sure to ship with them, and has got a score 
more, I warrant ! Go to Livorno.” 

“ Livorno !” The name told hardly anything to Bruno ; 
it was where the fish came from, that was all he knew, and 
the river ran there ; and now and then from it to Signa there 
would come some seafaring fellow home for a week to his 
parents or brothers, bringing with him tales of strange coun- 
tries, and weeds that smelt of salt, and wonderful large shells ; 
and such a one would put up in one of the chapels a votive- 
offering picturing a shipwreck, or a vessel burning on the 
ocean, or a boat straining through a wild white squall, or some 
such peril of deep waters from which he had been delivered : 
that was all Bruno knew. Except into the great towns to sell 
or buy seeds or oxen, Bruno had never stirred from the hill he 
was born on, and to quit it had never entered his imagination. 
To him Livorno was as Nova Zembla or the heart of Africa is 
to older denizens of wider worlds. 

The contadino not seldom goes through all his life without 
seeing one league beyond the fields of his labor, and the village 
that he is registered at, married at, and buried at, and which 
is the very apex of the earth to him. Women will spin and 
plait and hoe and glean within half a dozen miles of some great 
city whose name is an art glory in the mouths of scholars, and 
never will have seen it, never once, perhaps, from their birth 
down to their grave. A few miles of vine-bordered roads, a 
breadth of corn-land, a rounded hill, a little red roof under a 
mulberry tree, a church tower with a saint upon the roof, and 
a bell that sounds over the walnut trees, — these are their 
world : they know and want to know no other. 

A narrow life, no doubt, yet not without much to be said 
for it. Without unrest, without curiosity, without envy; 


SIGNA. 169 

clinging like a plant to the soil : and no more willing to wander 
than the vinestakes which they thrust into the earth. 

To those who have put a girdle round the earth with their 
footsteps, the whole world seems much smaller than does the 
hamlet or farm of his affections to the peasant: — and how 
much poorer ! The vague, dreamful wonder of an untraveled 
distance — of an untracked horizon — has after all more romance 
in it than lies in the whole globe run over in a year. 

Who can ever look at the old maps in Herodotus or Xeno- 
phon without a wish that the charm of those unknown limits 
and those untraversed seas was ours ? — without an irresistible 
sense that to have sailed away, in vaguest hazard, into the 
endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must have had a 
sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted 
from “ the tour of the world in ninety days” ? 

But Bruno was almost as simple and vague in belief as the 
old Father of Histoiy, and the idea of the earth he dwelt on 
was hardly clearer to him than to any Lake-dweller in Lacus- 
trine ages. Dangerous people called Frances! were in great 
numbers beyond that sea whose west wind sent the rain up, 
and the floods, and the fish ; and in Borne God lived, or St. 
Peter did, — which was the same thing : so much he knew, but 
no more ; he did not want to know more ; it would not have 
done him any good, the priest said so. 

Therefore, when he heard now that the children were gone 
to the sea-shore, it was for him as if they had gone with any 
falling star into the dusky and immeasurable depths of night. 
But, being a man who thought little but acted fast, and 
would have followed Signa into the fires of the bottomless 
pit, he did not tarry a moment, but flung his cloak over his 
shoulder, and prepared to go straight seaward. 

“ I will go get the pony,” he said, stupidly, like a man 
stunned, and was moving off, but the old man raking in the 
dust stopped him. 

“ Nay : what good is a pony, forty miles if one ? If the 
beast were fresh you would not be in time. The Ape is there 
by this time. Go by the iron way. So you will get to the 
sea a little after sunrise.” 

“ The iron way ?” said Bruno, dully : the thought was new 
and strange and weird to him ; he saw the hateful thing, it is 
true, winding every day through the green vine-shadows under- 
H 15 • 


170 


SIONA. 


neatli his hill, but to use it — to trust to it — ^it was like riding 
the horned Fiend. 

“To be sure,” said the old man with the rake and basket. 
“ Come — I will show you the way — it is a good step — ^you will 
eive me something for charity.” 

“ I might get a horse,” muttered Bruno, and pulled his 
canvas bag out and counted his coppers and his little dirty 
crumpled notes. 

He had not very many francs ; twenty or so, that was all ; 
^ust what he had taken in the market on the Friday before. 
He had never been away from home. He had no idea what 
travel might cost. 

“ No horse that you could hire would get by daybreak to the 
sea,” said the old man, who knew he would get nothing by his 
hiring a horse, but thought he might turn a penny by leading 
him to the rail. “ Think : you want those children ; and if 
you saw the ship just out of port and could not reach her, 
would you forgive yourself? You would never see them 
again, — never all the rest of your days. The Ape would take 
care of that. But go by the quick way. They will come 
through from Florence in a few minutes. I hear the clock 
striking.” 

Bruno shivered a little under his brown skin. Never to see 
the boy again ! — and what would he say to Pippa on the great 
day when all the dead should meet ? 

“ For the boy’s sake,” he muttered : there was no peril or evil 
he would not have run the gauntlet of to serve or save the boy. 

“ Show me the way, if it be the best way,” he said to the old 
man, with that curious and pathetic helplessness which at times 
comes over men who, physically courageous, are morally weak. 

“ Yes, I will show it you. But you will give me some- 
thing?” stipulated the rag-picker, shouldering his basket. 
Bruno nodded. 

The old man hobbled on before him through a few crooked 
lanes and little streets, throwing quaint black shadows on the 
moon-whitened pavement with his rake and his rush skip. 
Bruno followed, his brain in a dark confusion, and his heart 
sick for the danger tO the boy. 

When they reached the place, the iron horse already was 
rushing in through the cool white night, flinging foam and 
fire as it came. 


SIONA. 


171 


It seemed to Bruno as if ten thousand hammers were 
striking all at once. The showers of sparks seemed to him 
as if from hell itself. 

He could watch for thieves alone on the dark hill-side in 
autumn nights. He could break in wild colts to the shafts, 
and fierce steers to the yoke. He would stride through a 
hostile throng at a brawl, at a wine-fair, careless though every 
man there were his foe. He had the blood in him that has 
flowed freely from Monteaperto to Montana. But he was 
afraid of this unnatural and infernal thing. His fancy was 
bewildered, and his nerve was shaken by it. He was like a 
soldier who will face a mine but shudders from a spectre. 

“ It is horrible, — unnatural, — unchristian,” he muttered, as 
the great black engine, with its trail of flame and smoke, stood 
panting like a living animal. 

“ But we must use the devil’s work when it serves us. All 
the saints say that,” said the old man, dragging him to the 
hole in the wall and twisting his money out of the bag and 
getting him his pass in due exchange. 

Bruno was like a sheep ; he followed mechanically, dull 
with the ghastly fear of what had happened to the boy, and 
the vague personal terror of this unknown force to which he 
had to trust. 

There were great noise, great shouting, hurrying to and fro, 
roaring wf the escaped steam, lights green and red flashing in 
the dark. 

Confused and uncertain, Bruno caught his bag out of the 
old man’s hand, sprang in a hole that some one shoved him 
to, and felt himself moving without action of his own, with 
the sparks of fire dancing past his eyes. 

“ For the boy,” he said to himself ; and he made the sign 
of the cross under his cloak, and then sat down as he saw 
others do. 

If he went to his death, it was in seeking the boy: he 
would meet Pippa with a clean soul. 

The old man hobbled away chuckling. Bruno, true to his 
word, had given him a penny ; but in his palm he held four 
of the dirty notes, each of one franc. 

“ I might have taken more,” he said to himself, with self- 
reproach. “ He never would have known. The saints send 
one folks in trouble 1” 


172 


SIONA. 


Bruno was borne on swiftly through the night. 

With him there were a monk, a conscript, and two conta* 
dini with a basket of poultry between them, and two melons 
in a handkerchief. An oil lamp burned dully overhead, 
throwing yellow gleams on the young soldier’s boyish face, 
and the begging friar’s brown cowl, and the black brows of 
the sleeping peasant-women, and the green wrinkled globes of 
the fruit. 

They rocked and thundered, and rattled and flew; the white 
steam and the rain of sparks drifting past the wooden window. 

Bruno was like a man in a nightmare. He only dimly 
understood the danger assailing the boy. He had heard that 
men took children to foreign countries, tempting them with 
fair promises, and then grinding their little souls and bodies 
in the devil’s mill. But it was all vague to him, like every- 
thing else outside the lines of his vines or beyond the walls of 
the Lastra. 

Only a word of the rag-picker’s haunted him like a ghost. 

The man would take ship ; and he himself might reach too 
late, and see the ship sailing — sailing — sailing, — and never be 
able to overtake it or see the face of the child again. 

That horror clung to him. 

He sat gazing into the night, making the sign of the cross 
under his cloak, and muttering ever and again an ave. 

“ You are in trouble, my good son ?” said the monk. 

“ Yes, father,” answered Bruno ; but he said no more. It 
was not his way to take refuge in words. 

A great dull tumult of horror was on him. The strange 
noise and swaying motion added to it. All the ill that ever 
he had done in all his life — and it was much — surged up over 
him. It was divine vengeance on his sins, he thought ; he had 
not clean hands enough even to save Pippa’s child. He had 
been a wild, fierce man, and had never ruled his passions, and- 
had struck rough blows when he should have asked forgive- 
ness, and had been lawless in his loves, and had made more 
than one woman rue the day his wish had lit on her. 

It seemed to him that it must be his sins which were pur- 
suing him. For the little lad was so innocent: why should 
this misery befall them else ? 

His thoughts were all in disorder, shaken together and 
whirling round and confusing him, so that ail he could think 


SIONA. 


m 


of was that ship sailing away, and he on shore, helpless : only 
now and then, in the midst of his pain, he thought too of his 
oxen, Tinello and Pastore were they hungry ? — would the 
man to whom he had left them have wit to give them their 
suppers ? — would they bellow with wonder at not seeing him 
in their stable ? — if he were a minute late they always lowed 
for him, thrusting their great white heads over the wooden 
half-door. 

So his thoughts went round and round, and the night train 
flew on with him, past the shining river in its thickets of 
cane and acacia, and the gray hills silvery in the moonshine, 
and the knolls of woodland with their ruined fortresses, 
and the vineyards that grew green where ruined Semifonte 
was leveled with the soil, and the silent sleeping towns, and 
Pisa with her cold dead beauty like a lifeless Dido on her 
bier, and so past the great dense woods and breezy heathery 
moorlands of the king’s hunting-grounds, till in the light of 
the moon a white streak shone, and the monk, pointing to it, 
said to them, — 

“ There is the sea.” 

It was four in the morning. 

On the long low sandy lines of the coast, and on the blue 
waters, the moonlight was still shining. In the east the great 
arc of the sky, and the distant mountains, and the plains with 
their scattered cities, were all rose-colored with the flush of the 
rising day. Night and morning met, and kissed and parted. 

Bruno went down to the edge of the sea, as they told him, 
and looked, and was stupefied. In some vague way the strange 
beauty of it moved him. The vast breadth of water that was 
so new to him, sparkling under the moon, with white sails mo- 
tionless here and there, and islands, like clouds, and, in face 
of it, the sunrise, awed him with its wonder as the familiar 
loveliness of his own hills and valleys had no power to do. 

He forgot the child a moment. 

He crossed himself and said a prayer. He was vaguely 
afraid. He thought God must be there. 

He stood motionless. The rose of the dawn spread higher 
and higher, and the stars grew dim, and the moon was bathed 
in the daylight. A boat put out from the shore, and stole 
softly away across the gleaming blue, making a path of silver 
on the sea. 


15 * 


174 


SIGNA. 


Brano, like a man waking, remembered the warning of the 
ship ; for aught he knew, the boat was a ship, and the child 
was borne away in it. 

His heart grew sick with fear. He stopped the only crea- 
ture that was near him on the way, — a fisherman going to set 
his pots and creels in the rock-pools to catch crabs. 

“ Is that a ship going away ?” he asked. 

The fisherman laughed. 

“ That is a little boat, going fishing. Where do you come 
from, that you do not know a ship ?” 

“ Has one sailed yet, since night ? Away ? — quite away ? 
— not to come back?” 

“ What do you mean ?” said the fisherman. “ If you mean 
the mail-ships or the steamers to Elba or Genoa, — no ! Nothing 
will leave port till night. Some will come in. Why do you 
ask ? Ho you want to get away ?” 

The fisher glanced at him with some suspicion. 

Bruno’s eyes had a strange look, as if some peril were about 
him. 

“You are sure no ship will go away?” he asked, per- 
sistently. 

“ Not till nightfall,” said the fisherman. “ There are none 
due. Besides, there is a dead calm : see how those rowers 
pull.” 

And he trudged on with his lobster-pots and creels. This 
man was in trouble, he thought : it was best not to meddle 
with him, for fear of getting into any of the trouble. 

Bruno went on along the wharf. 

The natural shrewdness of a peasant’s habits of action 
began to stir underneath the confusion of his brain and the 
perplexity of his ignorance and his sorrow. In many things 
he was stupid, but in others he was keen. He began to con- 
sider what he could best do. That great wide water awed 
him, — appalled him, — fascinated him ; but he tried not to 
think of it, not to gaze at it ; he looked, instead, up at the 
moon, and was comforted to see it was the same that hung 
over the hills of Signa, to light the little gray aziola homeward 
through the pines. It seemed to him that he was half a world 
away from the quiet fields where Tinello and Pasture drew the 
plow beneath the vines. 

But he had to find the boy : that he must do before ever 


SIGNA. 


175 


he saw the Signa hills again. He pondered a little, passing 
along the wharves, then turned into a wine-house that was 
opening early for seafaring men, and ate some polenta, and 
drank, and asked them tidings — if they could give any — of a 
little lad with a violin, who had been stolen. 

The tavern-folks were curious and compassionate, and would 
have helped him if they could have done so, but knew nothing. 
Only they told him that if the child had a pretty trick of 
melody he would be nearly sure to be taken to earn money 
where the gay great people were, southward, along where he 
could see the tamarisk- trees. If he did not find the children in 
the old town, it would be best to go southward towards noon. 

He thanked them, and wandered out, and about all the old, 
ugly, salt-scented lanes and streets and busy quays piled with 
merchandise and fish, and lines of fortifications, and dull squares 
and filthy haunts, where there was a smell of salt fish all day 
long, and the noise of brawling sailors of divers countries, 
and screaming foreign birds, and the strong odor of fishing- 
nets and sails and cordage. 

He heard nothing of the boy, but learned that a ship would 
go away to the coast of France at sunset. 

So at noon, as they had told him it would be best to do, he 
went along the sea-shore, southward, past the lighthouse and 
through the green lines of feathery tamarisks, that Titania 
of trees, with its sweet breath, that is fiower and forest, and 
spice and sea, and feather and fern, all in one, as it were. 

To ask any public authority to aid him never occurred to 
him. He had been too often at feud with it in his wild youth 
to dream of seeking it as any help. Bruno and the guardians 
of order loved not one another. When he saw them at street- 
corners, with their shining swords and their soldiering swag- 
ger, he gave them a wide berth, or, if forced to go by them, 
passed with a fiercer glance than common, and a haughtier 
step, as of one who defies. 

His heart was sick as he went by the shining water. The 
horror came on him that he had been misled. Neither 
mountebank nor rag-picker had been sure that the children 
had come to the shore. At best it had been only a thought. 

Bruno felt for his knife in his waist-band under his shirt. 
If only he could deal with the man who had taken the boy ; 
and with Lippo. 


176 


SIGNA. 


His soul was black as night as be went along in the full 
sunshine, with the azure water glowing till his bold eyes ached 
to look at it. 

He had never known till now how well he loved the child. 

And if he had drifted away to some vile, wretched, sinful, 
hopeless life, — the life of a beaten dog, of a stage monkey, of 
a caged song-bird, — if he lived so and died so, what could he 
say in heaven or in hell to Pippa ? 

The sweet tamarisk scent made him sick as he went. 
The play of the sun on the sea seemed to him the cruelest 
thing that ever laughed at men’s pain. 

When he came among the gay people and the music, and 
the color and the laughter of the summer bathers, and the 
beautiful women floating in the water with their long hair 
and their white limbs, he hated them all : for sheer pain he 
could have taken his knife and struck at them, and made the 
sparkling blue dusky with their death. It was not only the 
child that he lost ; it was his power to save his own soul. 

So he thought. 

He went through the long lines of the tamarisks, a brown 
straight figure, with naked feet, and bold eyes full of pain, 
like a caught hawk's, in the midst of the fluttering garments 
and the loosened hair and the mirthful laughter and the grace- 
ful idleness of these bathers, whom Watteau would have 
painted for a new voyage to Cytherea. 

Bruno did not notice what he was among. The Tuscan 
blood is too republican to be daunted by strange rank or novel 
spectacle. Whatever be its other faults, servility is utterly 
alien to it, and a serene dignity lives in it side by side with 
indolent carelessness. 

Bruno went through these delicate patricians, these pictur- 
esque idlers, these elegant women, as he went through the 
poppies in the corn. They were no more to him. 

He had come into the environs of the Ardensas, with the 
pretty toy villas glittering on each side of him, and in front 
the Maremma road, with bold brown rocks and sheep-cropped 
hills, going away southward to the marshes and to Borne ; and 
on the sea, boats with wing-like sails, some white, some brown, 
and the coral-fishers’ smacks at anchor, and in the sunlight 
the violet shores of Corsica. 

All at once his heart leaped. 


SIGN A. 


177 


He heard the notes of a violin, quite faint and distant, but 
sweet as the piping of a blackbird among the white anemones 
of earliest spring. 

There were ten thousand violins and more in the world. 
He did not think of that. To him there was but one. 

He made his way straight toward the sound. 

It came from a group of tamarisks and evergreens set round 
a lawn some short way from the shore, where the luxurious 
bathers, after their sea-plunge, were gathered in a little throng, 
with all the eccentric graces of apparel that fashion is amused 
to dictate to its followers. 

His heart leaped with surer joy as he drew nearer and nearer ; 
he recognized the song that was being sung, a rispetto of the 
people, strung to an old grand air of Benedetto Marcillo, the 
Venetian ; having heard the air of it on the sacristan’s organ, 
and which he had played night after night on his little lute, 
sitting outside the door of Tinello and Pastore’s stable, while 
the sun went down behind the hill. 

“ Morir5, morir5, sarai contenta. 

Piii non la sentirai mia afflitta voce ! 

Quattro campane sentirai sonare 
’Na piccola campana a bassa voce. 

Quando lo sentirai ’1 morto passare 
r^tti di fuora, che quella son io 
Ti prego, bella, viemmi a accompagnare 
Fino alia chiesa per I’amor di Dio 
Quando m’incontri, fallo il pianti amare 
Ilicdrdati di me quando t’amavo 
Quando m’incontri, volgi i passi indietro 
Kicordati di me quand’ ero teco.”'^ 

Bruno knew nothing of the name of the air, but he knew 
the words, and, with a great cry, he pushed his way into the 
brilliant circle. 




shall die, shall die; and thou wilt be content. 

Thou wilt no longer hear my lamentation. 

Four bells will ring upon thine ear for me. 

And one small bell much lower than the rest! 

When thou shalt learn the dead is passing by. 

Come forth to see me, for that dead am I. 

I pray thee, love, come forth to come with me, 

Como to the church for the dear love of God ; 

And when thou seest me, gather bitter plants, / 

And think of me in our dead days of love; 

And when thou seest me, turn thy steps within. 

Think of me in the time when I was thine. 

Tuscan Rispetto. 


178 


SIGNA. 


The music ceased ; the child looked up ; he was standing in 
the midst of the graceful women and idle men, playing and 
singing, with big tears rolling down his cheeks. 

Gremma, with a scarlet ribbon in her short gold locks, and 
her hands full of sweetmeats, was running from one to another 
of the listeners, taking all they gave. 

“Signal” cried Bruno. 

The boy stopped a moment, lifting his great eyes in piteous 
uncertainty of what was right to do ; then the impulses of 
affection, and of habit, and of home were too strong for his 
resolution of self-sacrifice ; he sprang into Bruno’s outstretched 
arms. 

“ Oh, take me back, take me back, and Gemma too !” he 
sobbed ; “ and you will not hurt Lippo ? promise me, promise 
me — because they will hurt you ; and that is why I ran away, 
for fear that I should bring you harm. But I am so unhappy. 
Gemma laughs and loves it all ; lJut I — Oh, take me back to 
the Lastra ; and will they tell me there if I have hurt Nita and 
ought to die ? But promise me about Lippo first ; promise 
me !” 

Gemma stood looking, the sea-wind blowing the scarlet 
ribbon in her curls ; she pouted sulkily, and ate a sweetmeat. 

“ I promise you,” said Bruno. His eyes were blind, his lips 
trembled ; he held the boy in his arms and kissed him on the 
forehead. Then he set him down, and his hand went to his 
knife, and a sudden savage remembrance swept across his face 
and darkened out of it all tenderness of emotion. 

“ Let me get at the brute : point him out,” he said, in his 
teeth, while his eyes glanced over the gathered people. 

But there were only the languid idlers staring at him, and 
asking each other if it were a concerted scene to enhance the 
charm of the little fellow’s playing. The man Giovacchino had 
disappeared at the first glance of the stalwart peasant coming on 
his errand of vengeance. 

Had Bruno known what his face was like, he would have 
had but little chance of reaching him in the mazes of the tama- 
risk groves ; as it was, pursuit was impossible. He took the 
two children by the hand. “ Point me out, boy, — show me 
him,” he said, breathlessly. 

But Signa, bewildered, stared around, and could see nothing 
like his tempter. 


SION A. 


179 


“He is gone, I think,” he whispered, clinging to Bruno’s 
cloak. “ He was not a bad man ; he was very kind.” 

“ He was very good, and I want him,” said Gemma, with a 
flood of tears. “ He has promised me pink shoes, and a coral 
necklace, and a little gilt carriage to ride in, and a harlequin 
toy that one can put on the floor to dance.” 

“ What is it?” said the loungers. “ Is it a comedy scene to 
make one admire the children in new parts?” 

Bruno seized Gemma roughly, and took Signa by the hand. 

“ Let us go home,” he said, and the rage died ofiF his face, 
and a great serene thankfulness came on it. 

He had back the boy. 

Pippa would know he tried to keep his word. The man 
might go unpunished. 

Signa clung to him, mute, and half out of his wits with the 
sudden wonder of this deliverance from the fate he loathed. 
Bruno to him had been Providence always : as other children 
see the strength of godhead in their parents’ care, so he in 
Bruno’s. To feel that Bruno was there was to Signa to be 
ransomed out of death. He was speechless and dizzy with 
his joy. 

The idlers under the tamarisks watched him, supposing it 
some portion of the programme of these pretty children, who 
had come upon the sands that morning, — the boy with a voice 
so sweet that the child Haydn himself never sang more divinely 
those famous trelli for the famous cherries that in old age he 
loved to recall with such delight, and the girl with such a little 
face of grace that she might have stepped straight down 
from any triptych of Botticelli, or flown from any ceiling of 
Correggio. 

“ Where are you going to take him? Is the boy your 
son?” said one of the gentle-people, who had been giving their 
money and their pretty trifles to hear Signa sing and play. 
“ Do you know he is a little Mozart ? What do you mean to 
do with such a genius as his ? Not bury it ? Tell me all 
about him. Where do you live ?” 

But Bruno flashed a dark glance of suspicion over the ele- 
gant throng, and answered nothing, only moved his hat in 
half-defiant courtesy of farewell, and moved away, afraid that 
if he stayed some other means would be found by some one 
to take the child away. 


180 


SIGNA. 


His hand gripped Signa’s firmly. 

“ Let me get home,” he said. 

Signa smiled all over his little pale startled face. 

“ To the Lastra !” he said, with a little sigh of sweetest 
self-content. 

“ What genius !” said the throng left under the tamarisk- 
trees. 

“ What is genius ?” thought Signa. “ But anyhow, if I 
have itj it will go home with me. I did not get it here.” 

“ Why do you cry, Gemma ?” he said, aloud. 

Gemma hung back, and stamped her foot, and sobbed with 
fury, letting all her gilded sweets and pretty treasures of 
painted paper fall on the sand as she went. 

“ I will not go back ! I will not go back !” she said. “ I 
want the pink shoes, and the gilt carriage. We have nothing 
to eat at home, and you heard them all say I am so pretty. I 
want to hear them say it again. I will not go back ! — I will 
not !” 

“ But I am going too,” said Signa. 

Gemma pushed him away and struck at him with her rosy 
little fists. But no one heeded her rage. 

Bruno dragged her along without attention to her lament, 
and Signa for once was indifferent to her ; he clasped his violin 
close, and he was going back to the Lastra ; he was so happy 
that it almost frightened him. He seemed to have lived 
years since he had run along, with the angel’s gift, by the 
Greve water three nights before. 

He went back straight to the wine-house in the town. 

He asked them if they were hungry. They were not. The 
man who had decoyed them had fed them well ; till they were 
out of sight of shore, stolen children had nothing but good- 
ness at his hands : the gold-bedizened mountebank had only 
said the truth. 

There was a rough, kindly woman at the wine-house. Bruno 
gave her Gemma to take care of for the few hours that had 
to pass before they could get away to the Lastra. 

Gemma was crying sullenly ; she hated to go back ; she 
wanted this pretty gay world that she had had a glimpse of, 
that was all ribbons and sweetmeats and praises of her pretti- 
ness ; she hated to be taken to the bed of hay, to the crust of 
black bread, to the lonely garden, to the trouble of hunting 


SIGNA. 


181 


liens’ eggs, and killing grubs in the flowers, and beating sheets 
with stones in the brook with Palma. 

Then he took Signa out into the open air. It seemed to him 
that what he had to say had better be said there. Between 
four walls, Bruno, hill-born and air-fed, felt stifled always. 

The boy and he went silently down to the edge of the sea 
once more. 

Signa was startled and subdued. 

He felt as if he were a child no longer, but quite old. 

He had known what it was to be adrift on the world ; to 
gain money ; to be heart-sick for home ; to hear that he had 
some great gift that other people wondered at ; the contrast 
and conflict of all these varying emotions had exhausted him. 
And he was sorry, too, about Gemma, — Gemma, who cried for 
a strange life, for a strange country, for a strange man, — 
Gemma, who cared more about a scarlet band in her curls, and 
a gilded box of sugar, than ever she had done for all his music 
or caresses. 

Signa had had his first illusion broken. 

He was no longer only a child. 

Fair faiths are the blossoms of life. When the faith drops, 
spring is over. 

Amidst his great mute happiness at his own home there 
was a dull pain at his heart. He had found that beyond the 
mountains he was no nearer God. 

Bruno watched in silence along the sea. They came at last 
along the level shore to a little creek, where the brown rocks 
cast deep shadows, where the water was in golden shallow 
pools, full of sea- weeds and sea- flowers, where the town was 
sunken out of sight behind them, and they were quite alone 
with the wide blue radiance before them in the splendor of the 
noon. 

“ Sit here,” said Bruno, and threw himself down upon the 
rock. Signa obeyed him, letting his little brown legs hung 
over into the pool and feel the cool sparkling ripples break 
against them. Bruno watched him. 

Even now the boy was not thinking of him. 

Signa with dreaming eyes was looking out to the sea and the 
sky, and his hand was, by unconscious instinct, touching soft 
minor chords on the strings of his Busignuolo. 

“ What are you thinking of?” said Bruno, abruptly. He 


182 


SIGNA. 


was jealous of these far-away thoughts that he could never 
follow. 

Signa hung his head. 

“ I do not know, — hardly. Only I wondered, why does 
God make the earth so beautiful and men so greedy?” 

His own thoughts were sadder and wider than this, but 
they were dim to him ; he could not put them into better 
words. 

“ I suppose it is the devil,” said Bruno ; he had no better 
reason or consolation to give. 

Religion gives no better. 

Signa shook his head. It did not satisfy him: but he 
could find no better himself. 

“ It is the devil,” repeated Bruno, who believed firmly in 
what he said. And he watched the child anxiously ; he was 
oppressed with his own secret; he hated himself because he 
had not courage that night of the flood to bear poor dead 
Pippa to her grave and tell the simple truth. The truth 
looked so simple now, so easy and so plain ; he marveled why 
he had been fool enough to hide it : truth always has this 
vengeance soon or late. 

None desert her without seeing that she would have been 
their noblest friend. Only often it is too late when they do 
see it. Once driven away with the scourge of lies, she is very 
hard to call back. 

“ Lippo ill treats you?” he said, abruptly, having resolved 
to rend the spider’s web that he had let his brother weave 
about him. 

Signa withdrew his gaze from the sea with a sigh. On that 
world of waters he saw such beautiful things : why must he 
be brought back to the misery of blows and hunger and ill 
words ? 

“You have promised me not to hurt him,” he said, anxiously. 
“ They said you would hurt him — if you knew.” 

“ And that is why you never told me ?” 

“ Yes ; and why I ran away.” 

“ Tell me everything now.” 

The boy obeyed. Bruno listened. His face was very dark. 
He did not look up ; he lay on the rock at full length, resting 
his chin on his hands. 

“ I am sorry that I promised you.” 


SIGNA. 


183 


That was all he said when Signa’s little tale of childish woes 
and wrongs was ended. But there was a sound in his voice 
that told the child why they had said in the Lastra that Bruno, 
if he knew, would do that upon his brother which would take 
him himself to end his days in the galleys. 

“ But you have promised,” said Signa, softly. 

Bruno was silent. 

He was a fierce man, and in his passion faithless, and in his 
ways wild and weak at once, oftentimes. But he never broke 
a promise, — not even one made to the beasts in the yoke of 
his plow. 

There was a long silence, in which the gentle ripple of the 
water*' sounded clear : the intense silence of noon, when all 
things are at rest. After a while Bruno rose, and lifted the 
child up and set him between his knees, sitting on a great 
brown heap of rocks. 

“You have been very unhappy ?” 

“ Sometimes,” said Signa. 

“ And were silent for fear of evil I should do ?” 

“ Yes : for fear that they would harm you.” 

“ You do love me, then ?” 

“ You are good to me.” 

“ Would you love me if I did the evil?” 

“ Just the same.” 

“You would not be afraid of me ?” 

“ No.” 

“ How is that?” 

“ You would never harm me.” 

“ But if I did a great crime?” 

“ I would hate that ; but I would love you.” 

“ Who teaches you all this ?” 

“ I seem to hear God say it, — when I make the music. I 
do not know.” 

Bruno was silent. 

He put the boy from him, and leaned his head on his hands. 
Then suddenly he spoke, not looking up, — very quickly, and 
anyhow. 

“ Listen. I want to tell you the truth. I have hid it be- 
cause I was a coward, — at first from fear of trouble and of the 
people’s talk, and of late because I wanted you to love me a 
little, and thought you would not if you knew. Listen, dear. 


184 


SIGN A. 


It was such a simple thing. I was a fool. But Lippo put it 
so. I must have been a coward, I suppose. Listen. I had 
one sister, Pippa, a young thing, pretty to look at, and idle as 
a lizard in the sun. I was rough always, and too fierce and 
quick. They tell you right to be afraid of me. I have done 
much evil in my years. I was always a brute to Pippa. I 
had a sort of hate of her. When the girl came, my mother 
looked at none of us. I see her now, — a little brown baby 
laughing or crying all day long, and my mother thinking of 
nothing but of her. I see her now in the sun under the 
Pieta, in the house-door, her little red mouth sucking at the 
breast, and mother so proud and singing and talking of the 
time when she would want her marriage-pearls. I hated her. 
No matter, — I knew it was a sin. I was rough and cruel with 
Pippa, grudging her all pleasure and all playtime, and when 
my mother died she had a hard time of it with me : — yes, I 
know. And at a wine-fair she would dance when I forbade 
her, and mocked me about a woman, — never mind, — and I 
struck my knife into her. I should have killed her, only the 
people held me back, and the knife turned on the busk of her 
bodice, and only stabbed the flesh. You see, I was a brute 
to her. That is what I want you to understand. Well, — 
then, — one day she went away. I cannot tell where she went 
to, — no matter. And the years went by. And one night, 
the night of the great flood that you have heard us tell of, 
Lippo and I, seeking the sheep, came on a woman in the field. 
She had fallen down over the height, from that road we go on 
from the town up to the hill. She was quite dead. She had 
a child. We saw that it was Pippa. Then Lippo urged to 
me, the sheep would drown ; the girl was dead, — the town 
might say that we had murdered her ; he thought it best to 
say nothing till the morning. We took you ; we took the 
child. We left her there till morning. The river rose. It 
took her body with it. We never found it. Then Lippo 
urged again. Why say that it was Pippa? It would do no 
good. People would think we were ashamed of her, and so 
had killed her. We could not prove we had not. What use 
was it to say anything? The river had her. So I let it be. 
I was a coward. Then there was the child. Lippo would 
send it to charity. He had too many mouths to feed. But 
that I would not have, for Pippa’s son. I got Lippo to keep 


SIGNA. 


185 


it with his own, giving him half of all T got. He has had 
lialf and more. His children have fattened like locusts off 
my land. You know that. I thought he used you well. You 
never told me. I did for the best. Lippo has cheated me. 
Hear, you are Pippa’s son. I got to love you. I was afraid 
that you would hate me if you knew. I have been a coward. 
That is all. Will you forgive me? Your mother does, I 
think.” 

Signa had listened with breathless lips and wide-opened, 
startled, wondering eyes. 

When the voice of Bruno ceased, he stretched his arms out 
with a little bewildered gesture, glanced round at sea and sky 
one moment, then tottered a little, and fell in a dead faint : 
the long fatigue, the tumult of emotion, the peril and the pain 
that he had undergone, the wild delight of rescue and the hope 
of home, and now the story of his mother and her death, all 
overcame his slender strength. He fell, quite blind and sense- 
less, down at Bruno’s feet. 

When consciousness came back to him, his hair and clothes 
were drenched in the sea-water ; Bruno hung over him ten- 
derly as a woman. Signa lifted himself and gazed, and stretched 
his hand out for the violin, and saw Bruno, and remembered 
all. 

“ That was my mother !” he said, bewildered, and could not 
understand. 

Bruno’s eyes were wet with tears, salt as the sea. 

“ You do not hate me, dear?” he said, with a piteous en- 
treaty in his voice. “ I have tried to do right by you since. 
I think she is not angry, longer, if she knows.” 

“ No,” said Signa dreamily, confused as though he had been 
stunned by a heavy fall. 

“ That was my mother ?” he repeated, dully. He did not 
understand : the owls had never found him on the flood, then ; 
he had always thought they had. 

“ Yes, you are Pippa’s son. I have tried to do the best. 
You do not hate me — now?” 

Signa put his arms round Bruno’s neck. 

“ No. I love you. Take me home.” 


16 * 


186 


SIQNA. 


CHAPTER XYII. 

It was late in the afternoon when they got back to the 
tavern by the wharves. 

The child walked beside Bruno, very pale, and still, and 
sorrowful. 

“ You will not hurt Lippo ?” he said, once. 

I have told you no,” said Bruno. 

Then once he asked, — 

“ Had I a father too ?” 

“ No doubt, dear.” 

“ And why have I not his name ? The other children have 
their father’s name.” 

“ How can we tell what it may be ?” 

He could not say to the child, “ You have no claim on it.” 

“ And where is he ?” persisted Signa. 

“ I cannot tell. I know nothing,” answered Bruno, impa- 
tient of the theme. “ Pippa — your mother — went away to 
some strange country. We never knew anything more. Girls 
do these things, sometimes, when they are not happy.” 

“ Then my father may be — a king?” 

“ A beggar, more likely. Anyway, a rogue. Why think 
of him?” 

“ Why a rogue ?” 

Bruno was silent. 

“ Your mother came back very poor, by the look of her,” 
he said, after a while. “ And sad she must have been, or she 
would never have thought of her old home.” 

Signa was silent too. Then he said, musingly, — ‘‘ Perhaps 
he would care to hear me play. Do you think so ? When 
Carlo Gerimino makes at home figures in wood, — dogs, and 
mice, and birds, just what he sees, — his father is so proud, 
and promises to have him taught great things when he is old 
enough.” 

“ Do not think of him, I tell you, dear,” said Bruno, with 
impatience. “ You have me. I will do all I can. Think of 
the Holy Child and your wooden singing-bird ; that is better 
far. He may be dead, and so that and want together drove 


SIGNA. 


187 


her home. Anyway, it is of no use to vex your heart for him. 
We can never know ” 

“ I thought the owls found me,” said Signa, sadly, and 
dragged his little tired feet along, bewildered ; while the old 
violin clangored against him, and his head bent, and his hair 
hung over his eyes. 

He would have sooner chosen that the owls had found him. 
This sudden story, told in fragments, and never clearly, as was 
Bruno’s way, oppressed him with a sense of mystery and 
sorrow. 

Pippa’s son ? What did that mean ! 

He did not understand. 

But he understood that he would live with Bruno always, 
and with Tinello and Pastore, and with the sweet wild hill- 
side, all rosemary-scented, and dark with the asters and the 
myrtle and the pine ; and that made him glad, — that com- 
forted him. 

“ What beautiful things I shall hear all the day long !” he 
thought ; for when he was alone where the leaves were, and 
the sky was above him, he heard such beautiful things that it 
was the cruelest pity that they should ever be driven away by 
the rough noise of Toto’s fretting, and Nita’s rage, and the 
girls quarreling, and the baby’s screams, and the jar of the 
house-work, and the creak of the pump-wheel, and the curses 
of old Baldo on the gnats and flies. 

When they reached the sailors’ wine-house by the wharf, 
the boy was so tired that he had almost lost all consciousness 
of anything that went on round him. But at a great rush of 
voices, and in the foul-smelling doorway, his dreamy eyes 
opened, and his dulled ears were started to attention, for he 
heard the woman of the place calling aloud, — 

“And who could have thought? a casement no wider than 
one’s thumb, as one may say ? and how she could get through 
it passes me ; the man must have helped her from outside. 
As the saints live, I took every care. I kept her in the little 
room at the back, that has the tamarisk in at the window, and 
shells and sea- weeds to amuse her, and a beautiful picture of my 
husband’s sister’s son, of the Martyrdom of the blessed Lo- 
renzo. And she had a good bowl of soup, and a roast crab, 
and a handful of figs, — eating for a princess, — and ate it all, 
every bit, she did ; and then she seemed tired and sleepy, and 


188 


SIGN A. 


no wonder, thought I, and I laid her down on the bench with 
a pillow, and just locked the door on her, and went about my 
work, and thought no more, because my husband is always a 
poor thing, and there are so many men coming and going, there 
is more than one woman can get through, — up at four, and to 
bed at past midnight, as I am. And then, looking out in the 
street, and seeing you coming with the little boy and the fiddle, 
I went to wake her up, and the room was empty, and some of 
the tamarisk twigs broken and tumbled down on the floor, so 
that, of course, through the lattice she must have gone, and 
the man must have been there to help her out. The window 
looks on a lane ; there is nobody ever there : oh, he might 
have done it quite well, only so small as the hole is, — that 
beats me. And it is no fault of mine, that Our Lady knows ; 
and why must you be leaving her with me ? and you will pay 
me for the soup, and the crab, and the figs, because she has 
got them away in her stomach.” 

“ Is G-emma lost ?” cried Signa, with a piteous wail in his 
voice that stopped the woman’s torrent of phrases. 

“ Yes, dear; it seems so,” said Bruno, in perplexity. “ But 
we will find her for you. Do not cry, Signa, do not cry ; you 
hurt me when you cry.” 

But to find her was beyond Bruno’s powers. He traced 
her to the quay; led by a man, they said. That was all he 
could hear. They had gone in a smack that sailed away, 
bound for Gorgona, at three in the afternoon. Some sailors 
on the wharf remembered noticing the golden-headed, chat- 
tering little child ; she seemed so happy to be off ; the smack 
was some strange one from some of the islands, — no Livornese 
craft ; it had come in the day before with pilchards ; they sup- 
posed that the man had got the owner of it to give him a lift 
over water; no one had known that there was any need to 
interfere ; they said that the father of the girl had better come 
and see ; no one else could have any right to meddle. 

That was all Bruno could learn. 

They were quite certain the child with the red ribbon and 
bare feet had gone to sea ; they showed him the distant sail, 
speeding fast over the waves, which were now freshened by a 
breeze that had sprung up: by the direction she was taking, 
they did not think that she was going to Gorgona ; anyhow, 
no one would overtake her till long after nightfall. 


SIGNA. 


189 


Sign a stood and sobbed his heart out by the sea. 

Bruno pondered a little. He could do no good, and he 
had barely enough coins upon him to get home, and had no 
credit in this strange town, nor any friend ; besides, who could 
tell if Tinello and Pastore were well fed? They might be 
stolen, — heaven alone could tell ; if the men threshing with 
him were not faithful, no one could say what evil might not 
happen, nor what ruin or what blame the fattore might not 
lay upon him for his absence without a word. To stay an- 
other night away was impossible ; he could do no good to 
Gemma, and would be penniless himself upon the morrow, and 
powerless to return. 

He pondered a little while, then paid the woman at the 
wine-house for the crab and figs that she lamented over, and 
made his way back in the full red sunset heat by the iron way 
he hated, half leading, half carrying the boy into the wagon, 
where Signa wept for his playmate, till he wept himself to 
slumber, as the train, groaning, started on its way, leaving the 
brilliance of the golden west and the blue sea, to plunge across 
the marshy wastes by Pisa, and traverse the green vine-coun- 
try, where the Ave Maria bells were ringing, and pause in the 
still twilit ancient towns, and so reach the hills above the 
Lastra. 

It was quite dark when they reached the hill of Signa. 

Bruno, quite silent, looked up with a longing glance to the 
purple lines of pine, where his vines were, and where Tinello 
and Pastore dwelt in their shed under the great magnolia-tree. 
But before he turned his steps thither, he had to tell of Gem- 
ma’s loss ; he pressed money on her father, and sent him sea- 
ward, on the vag-ue chance that what they had heard might 
be untrue ; then, holding Signa by the hand, he went straight 
down into the Lastra. 

It was eight of the night. 

Bells for the benediction offices were ringing from many 
chapel towers on the hills ; single sonorous bells answering one 
another under the evening shadows, and calling across the hills. 

The people were all about, idling at their doors, or in knots 
of three or four talking of the many little matters that make 
up the history of a country summer day. There was hardly 
a lamp alight. The moon had not risen. 

But the men and women all knew Bruno as he came down 


190 


SIGNA. 


into the midst of them with the stately tread of his bare swift 
feet. 

A stillness fell upon them. They thought he came to take 
his brother’s life, most likely. They drew a little into their 
own doors, and others came up from passages and houseways. 

“ Where is Lippo ?” he asked of them. 

No one answered. But, by an involuntary unconscious 
glance that all their eyes took, it was easy for him to see slink- 
ing away on the edge of the throng the slender, supple figure 
of his brother. 

“ Wait there I” cried Bruno. I shall not harm you, 
coward.” 

Lippo paused, — by some such fascinated fear as makes the 
bird stay to be done to death at the snake’s will. 

“ People of Lastra, I have something to say,” said Bruno, 
standing still; a tall, brown, half-bare figure in the gloom, 
with the boy beside him. 

All the people ran out to listen, men and women and chil- 
dren, breathless and afraid: what could he be doing with 
words, he whose weapon was always straighter and swifter 
than any speech can be ? 

The voice of Bruno rang out loud and clear, reaching the 
open windows and the inner courts, and the loiterers at the 
gateways. 

“ I have something to say. I am a rough man. It is easier 
to me to use my hand, but I want to tell you, — it is just to 
the child. You remember that I was bad to^Pippa. I was 
cruel. I stabbed her, even ; you will remember. She was a 
gay girl, but no harm. She forgave it all : she said so. We 
never heard of her : you remember that. She went ; that was 
all. That night of the flood we found her dead, Lippo and I, 
quite dead, under the bank by the sea-road, just above there. 
There was a child with her : this child. I left her alone in the 
night out of fear, and because of the shame of it, and for the 
sake of the sheep, and because they might have thought that 
we had killed her : Lippo said so. At dawn I meant to go and 
tell the Misericordia, and go and bring her in and get her de- 
cent burial by holy church. I meant so : that I swear. But 
at daybreak the flood had got her. Now you know. It was 
of no use to say anything then : so Lippo said. It was as if 
one had murdered her. But the good God knows how it came 


SIGNA. 


191 


I got Lippo to take the boy. I said that I would pay for him, 
give half* I got for him, — always. I have done it. I thought 
the boy was happy and well fed. Sometimes I had words with 
him for the child’s sake. But on the whole I thought that all 
was well. For nine years Lippo has had my money and my 
money’s worth. For nine years he has lied to me, and beaten 
and starved and hurt the child. For nine years he has lied to 
me, and cheated me. You know me. I would kill a man as 
soon as a black snake in the corn ; but I have promised the 
boy. I lost the boy, and found him by the sea. The saints 
are good. The child ran away because he feared that I should 
do ill on his behalf, and fall into the power of the law. For 
him I will let Lippo be. If it were not for the child, I would 
kill him as one kills a scorpion — so ! You know me. Go, tell 
him what I say. Though we live both for fifty years, let his 
shadow never fall between me and the sun ; if he be wise. 
This is the truth. He has lied to me and cheated me. I do 
not forgive. Women and dogs may forgive; not men. This 
very day the child might have perished, body and soul. And 
what should I have said to Pippa before God’s face when the 
dead rose ? That is all.” 

He paused a moment, to see if any one would answer there 
in Lippo’s voice or Lippo's name. But the darkening groups, 
half lost in the night shadows, were all still, silenced by amaze- 
ment and by fear. 

Then Bruno turned, and, with the boy’s hand still in his, 
went through the western gateway, and up the road, beneath 
the trees, towards the river and the bridge, homeward. 

When he was quite lost to sight, the outburst of tongues 
buzzed aloud, like swarming bees under the stars. 

Was this the truth, indeed ? and hidden so long ! 

Bruno went on his way over the cloudy waters to his hills 


192 


SIGNA. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 

So the truth was told at last. 

And the Lastra, of course, after taking the night to consider, 
rejected it as a fiction. 

When truth in any guise comes up from her well, she has 
the fate of Ginevra when Ginevra rose from the tomb : every 
door is closed and bolted, and friends look her in the face and 
deny her. 

In the Lastra, after the first surprise of Bruno’s speech had 
passed away, there remained very few believers in his story. 

Old Teresina, who had always said that he was the better 
man of the twain, and Luigi Dini, who had seen him at a 
death-bed or two, and thought he had a soft heart under a 
hard hide, and his friend Cecco, the cooper, who made casks 
and tubs under the line near the bridge, with the old workshop 
with the barred window, and the vine behind it — these three, 
and a few women, who had loved Bruno in other years, and 
had sore hearts still, when they stopped working to think, — 
these did believe ; but hardly anybody else. 

At the time of his speaking, no one had heard him without 
belief. 

There was that strong emotion, that accent of truth, which 
always cleave their way to the hearts of hearers, however hard 
those hearts be set in antipathy or opposition. 

But after a while, feeling his way by little and little, and 
stealing softly into the minds of his townsfolk, Lippo wandering 
about with his sweetest voice, and tears in his eyes, sighed and 
murmured : that he would not speak ; nay, let poor Bruno clear 
himself, if he would ; he did not wish to say anything. H e 
could clear himself Oh, yes : as easily as you could split a 
melon in halves. People knew him. He was a poor man and 
of no account, but he had tried always to do good. He had 
been wrong ; yes, that he felt ; twice wrong, in giving the 
shelter of his roof to his brother’s base-born one, and then, 
again, in letting the infirmity of anger master him about all 
that good gold squandered on a squeaking toy. But in nothing 


SIGNA. 


.193 


else, so far as he could judge himself, — searching his heart. 
As for poor Pippa, Heaven knew he had sought high and low, 
vainly, for years and years, and never could get tidings of any 
fate of Pippa’s. There had been a dead woman and a child 
found, but not by him ; a woman Bruno had driven to her 
ruin ; but no, he would say nothing. The Lastra knew him 
and his brother both. Let it judge which spoke the truth. 
Only this, he swore by all the hosts of saints, no scrap of 
Bruno’s money or morsel of food off Bruno’s land had he or 
his ever touched in these nine years. The child he had taken 
in out of sheer pity, Bruno turning against his duty to it. But 
there, he would say nothing. He was glad and thankful when 
some natural feeling had awakened in Bruno for the boy : who 
knew what good it might not bring to that poor darkened 
soul ? If he wanted witness, there was Adamo, the wine- 
seller, who had seen him thrown brutally off the shafts of 
Bruno’s barroccino and had heard his life threatened by him ; 
but there — no, he would say nothing. The neighbors knew 
him. As for gratitude, that no man might look for ; but it 
was hard to be maligned after nine years’ forbearance. But 
the saints had borne much more and never took their ven- 
geance. In his own humble, poor little way, he would en- 
deavor to do like them. 

So Lippo, to the Lastra, — softly and by delicate degrees ; 
and such is the force of lying, a force far beyond that of truth 
at any time, that two-thirds of the town and more believed in 
him and pitied him. For start a lie and a truth together, like 
hare and hound ; the lie will run fast and smooth, and no man 
will ever turn it aside ; but at the truth most hands will fling a 
stone, and so hinder it, if they can. 

Lippo, jeopardized in credit a few days, recovered ground, 
and, indeed, gained in the public estimation, with time; so 
Tery prettily did he lie. 

The parish priest took his part, and that went far ; and the 
(Counsel of the Misericordia did the same, and that went 
farther still. 

Lippo, a good soul, who rarely missed early Mass, and often 
came to Benediction, — who never did anything on holy-days, 
except lie on his face in the full sun, and made his children do 
the same, — who, if he was offended, kept a tongue of oil and 
lips of sugar, — and who was almost certain to have all Baldo’s 
I 17 


194 


SIGN A. 


savings, when that worthy should be gathered to his fathers,- - 
Lippo, plausible and popular, and always willing to loiter and 
chatter at street-corners and^play at dominoes and take a 
drink, — Lippo had a hold on public feeling that Bruno never 
would have gained, though he had shed his life-blood for the 
Lastra. 

Most people knew, indeed, that Lippo was a liar ; but then 
he was so excellent a man that they respected him the more 
for that. 

So Lippo recovered his standing, and even heightened it ; 
and kept well out of the way of his brother ; and was brow- 
beaten by his wife within-doors for the loss of all the gain the 
boy had been to them, but went to mass with her all smiles, 
and on feast-days with his children was a picture of felicity ; 
and so no one was the wiser for what quarrels raged under the 
tiles of Baldo’s dwelling by the Loggia. And only old Teresina 
and Luigi Dini and Cecco and such like obstinate simpletons 
believed, or admitted they believed, that Pippa had been found 
dead on the night of the great flood. 

Why should they have believed it? It is dull work to 
believe the truth. 

Bruno in return bent his straight brows darkly on them, 
and kept his knife in his belt, and let them shout evil of him 
till they were hoarse in market-place and wine-shop. 

He was hated by them just as Lippo was believed in ; he 
was unpopular just as Lippo was popular. 

“ Well, let it be so,” he said to himself. He was indifferent. 

“ Other folks’ breath never made my soup-pot boil yet,” he 
would say to the old priest of his owm hill-side, who would 
sometimes remonstrate with him on the misconstruction that 
he let lie on him. “ They believe in Lippo. Let them believe 
in Lippo. Much good may it do to him and them.” 

But the old Parroco shook his head, having a liking for this 
wild son of the church, of whose dark, fierce, tender, self-tor- 
menting soul he had had true glimpses in the confessional, 
when Easter times came round and men disburdened themselves 
of their sins. 

“ But it will do you harm,” said he. The walnut-tree 
laughs at ants ; but when the swarm is all over its trunk and 
in its sap, where is the tree then ?” 

But Bruno bent his delicate dark brows, that made him like 


SIGN A. 


195 


a head of Cimabue’s drawing, and smiled grimly. If every 
man’s hand were against him, he cared nothing: he had his 
good land to till, and the boy with him in safety. 

If he could have wrung his brother’s throat he would have 
been happier indeed. As it was, having promised the boy, he 
passed Lippo in the Lastra with such a glance as Paul might 
have given to Judas; and otherwise seemed no more to remem- 
ber that he lived, than if he had been a dead snake that he had 
flung out in the road for the sun to wither. 

“ The same mother bore you,” the priest would urge some- 
times, “ and you honor the same God.” 

“ What has that to do with it?” said Bruno. “ Though he 
were my father, I would do just the same. He cheated me.” 

“ But forgiveness is due to all.” 

“ Not to traitors,” said Bruno. 

And no one could move him from that faith. And Lippo 
would go a long way round outside the gates rather than meet 
that glance of his brother’s in the narrow thoroughfares of the 
Lastra. 

Though on the whole, good man, the neighbors pitying him, 
he was the better for the wrath of Bruno, especially since he 
was quicker than ever to answer the Misericordia bell, and 
droned louder than ever his responses of the mass, being wise 
in his generation. 


CHAPTER XIX. 

So the child went up to the hills with Bruno, and stayed 
there for good and all, with Tinello and Pastore, and the big 
nmgnolia-tree, and the old gilded marriage-coffer, and the hens 
and the chickens, and the terra-cotta Annunciation, and the 
drying herbs and beans, and the big white dog from the Ma- 
remma, and the palm blessed on Easter day. 

He was not quite the same. 

He would never be quite the same again, Bruno thought, — 
and thought aright. 

The child’s vision had widened, and his thoughts had sad- 


196 


SIONA, 


dened ; and he knew now that there was a living world outside 
his dreams; and he doubted now that the skies would ever 
open to let him see the singing children of God. 

And he had lost his own mystery and wonder for himself. 
He was nothing strange that the owls had found in the soft 
night shadows and dropped down at the gates of Signa, as he 
had always thought. 

He was only Pippa’s son. 

Poor Pippa ! She was not dear to him. He could not care 
for her. When he went along the sea-road he had no instinct 
of remembrance of the night that he had lain against her 
breast and had had his cries hushed upon its aching warmth. 

Just Pippa’s son, as Toto was Nita’s, — that was all. 

That the angels had breathed upon him and said to each 
other, “Let this little soul see light,” and then dropped him 
softly on the waters, and so the white wise birds had found 
him and borne him to the Lastra, there to grow up and hear 
about him the music of the heaven he had been sent from, — 
that had been intelligible to him, and had seemed quite natural 
and beautiful and true. 

But Pippa’s son, as Toto was Nita’s ! 

That was pain to him, and perplexity. It made all dark. 

A child’s feet are bruised, and stumble on the sharp stones 
of a hard, physical, unintelligible fact. 

He was much happier, in truth, than he had ..ever been : 
unbeaten, unstarved, unpunished, with only the free, fresh, 
open-air toil to do, and the man’s strong affection about him 
for defense and repose, and often allowed to wander as he 
would, and play as he chose, and dream unhindered as he 
liked, — his life on Bruno’s hill-side was, beside his life in the 
Lastra with Lippo, as liberty by slavery, as sunshine by rain. 

And yet a certain glow and glory were gone out of his day 
for him ; because of this truth about himself which to himself 
was so much less easy of understanding than the vaguest fable 
or wildest miracle would have been. 

Pippa’s son ! — no brighter born or nearer heaven than that. 

It was his faith and fancy that were bruised and drooped 
like the two wings of some little flying bird that a stone strikes. 

The boy had something girlish in him, as men of genius 
have ever something of the woman ; and all that was gentlest 
and simplest in him suffered under the substitution of this 


SIGN A. 197 

harsh sad history of his birth for all his pretty foolish faiths 
and fancies. 

But in all the manner of his life he was much happier. 

In the country of Virgil, life remains pastoral 'still. The 
field-laborer of Northern countries may be but a hapless hind, 
hedging and ditching dolefully, or at best serving a steam-beast 
with oil and fire ; but in the land of the Georgies there is the 
poetry of agriculture still. 

Materially it may be an evil and a loss, — political economists 
will say so ; but spiritually it is a gain. A certain peace and 
light lie on the people at their toil. The reaper with his hook, 
the plower with his oxen, the girl who gleans among the trail- 
ing vines, the child that sees the flowers tossing with the corn, 
the men that sing to get a blessing on the grapes, — they have 
all a certain grace and dignity of the old classic ways left with 
them. They till the earth still with the simplicity of old, look- 
ing straight to the gods for recompense. Great Apollo might 
still come down amidst them and play to them in their thresh- 
ing-barns, and guide his milk-white beasts over their furrows, 
and there would be nothing in the toil to shame or burden him. 
It will not last. The famine of a world too full will lay it 
waste ; but it is here a little while longer still. 

To follow Tinello and Pastore as they plowed up and down 
the slanting fields under the vines, dropping the grain into 
each furrow as it was made ; to cut the cane and lucerne for 
the beasts, and carry the fresh green sheaves that dropped dew 
and fragrance over him as he went ; to drive the sheep up on 
to the high slopes, where the grass grew short and sweet, and 
the mosses were like velvet under the stone pines, and lie there 
for hours watching the shadows come and go on the mountains, 
and the bees in the rosemary, and the river shining far down 
below ; to load the ass and take him into the town with loads 
of tomatoes or artichokes or pumpkins or salads, as the season 
chanced to be, and ride him back among the hills, dreaming 
that the donkey was a war-horse, and the pines the serried 
lines of spears, and he a paladin, like Binaldo, of whom he 
had read in an old copy of the “ Morgante Maggiore” that lay 
in the sacristan’s chest in the Lastra, the sacristan holding it 
profane but toothsome versifying ; to keep watch over the 
grapes near vintage-time in the clear moonlit nights, when the 
falling stars flashed by scores across the luminous skies, and 


198 


SIONA. 


see the day-dawn rise and the sun mount over the far Umbrian 
hills and wake all the birds of all the fields and all the forests 
into song ; to pluck the grapes when they were ripe, with the 
bronzed leaves red and golden in the light, and load the wagon 
and dance on the wine-press till his feet were purple, while all 
over the hill-sides and along the fields by the water far and 
near the same harvest went on, with the echoes of the strife 
and the play and the laughter and the bursts of song making 
all the air musical from the city to the sea ; — this was the labor 
that he had to do, with kindly words and with easy pauses of 
leisure, the passing of the months only told by the change of 
the seeds and the fruits and the blossoms, and by the violets 
and the crocuses in the fields giving place to the anemones and 
the daffodils, and they to the snow-flakes and the arums, and 
they to the scarlet tulip and the blue iris, and they to the wild 
rose and the white broom, and they to the traveler’s joy and 
the yellow orchids, and so on through all the year, with as 
many flowers as there were hours. 

The life on the hill-side was full of peace for him, and 
wholesome labor, and innocent freedom, and all those charms 
of this country of sight and scent and sound which either are 
utterly unknown, unfelt, incomprehensible, or are joys strong 
as life and fair as children’s dreams ; for men and women are 
always either blind to the things of earth and air, or have a 
passion for them : there is no middle way possible. 

You shall know “ the hope of the hills” in its utmost beauty 
or know it never. 

Signa did know it, small creature though he was, and wholh 
untaught ; and the joy of the hills was with him day ana 
night whilst he dwelt here so high in air, with the deep 
mountain stillness round him and the sky seeming nearer than 
the earth. 

Weeks and months would go by, and he would not leave 
the hill-side for an hour, having no other companions than the 
little wild hares, and the gentle plow-oxen, and the blue jays 
that tripped among the white wakerobins, and the sheep that 
he would drive up under the beautiful red-fruited arbutus 
thickets, while far down below the world looked only like a 
broad calm lake of sunshine, — like a sea of molten gold. 

The child was tranquilized, though he was saddened, by that 
perfect solitude. 


SIGN A. 


199 


It was the most peaceful time also that Bruno’s life, tem- 
pestuous though monotonous, had ever known. 

Since he had lost the boy, he had come to know as he had 
never done before the full force of his great love for him, 
Signa was not to him only a creature that he cared for with 
all the strength of his nature, but he was like a soul committed 
to him straight and fresh from the hands of God, by care of 
which, and by all means of self-devotion and self-sacrifice, he 
was to redeem his own soul and to secure an everlasting life. 

He did not reason this out with himself, because reasoning 
was not the habit of his mind, but it was what he felt every 
time that he bowed his head before an altar or knelt before a 
crucifix. He prayed, with all his heart in the prayers, that 
he might do the best for the lad in all ways. 

Most days he went on bread himself, that he might be able 
to give meat twice a week to the growing boy. He went to 
the fairs in the early day, and left them as soon as his traffic 
was done, so that he might not spend money in roystering 
and get fighting as of old. He looked away from women, 
and strove not to be assailed by them, so as not to waste his 
substance on their tempting. He labored on his fields even 
earlier and later than he had ever done, to make them produce 
more, and so have means to get little trifles of pleasure or 
better nourishments for the boy. He grew more merciless at 
bargains, harder in buying and selling ; he gave no man drink, 
and flung no feast-day trinkets into women’s breasts : all the 
Tuscan keenness became intensified in him : he labored for the 
boy. 

Folks said that, losing his open-handedness, he lost the one 
saving grace and virtue he had had in him : he let them say 
it : if he were pitiless on others, he was no less so on himself. 
He combated the devil in him — what he called the devil — 
because he could not let the devil loose to riot in his blood, 
as he had used to do, without lessening the little he had, and 
that little would be the all of Pippa’s son. 

Now that Signa was under his roof and alwaj^s present 
with him, his love for the boy grew with each day. The sort 
of isolation in which his ill repute and evil tempers had 
placed him with his countryside made the companionship and 
the affection of this little human thing more precious than it 
would have otherwise been. 


200 


SIGNA. 


And as Lippo’s story obtained footing more and more in 
tbe Lastra, and the taverner’s tale of how he had struck 
Lippo off the cart under the pony’s hoofs spread and took 
darker colors, men and women looked colder than ever upon 
him, and avoided him more and more. Why should they 
not, — since now he never bought their absolution with a 
drink and the cards for the one sex, and bold wooing and free 
money for the other ? 

So the years rolled quietly on, without incident, and with 
no more noteworthy memory in them than the excellence or 
the paucity of the vintage, the large or small yield of the 
Turkish wheat, the birth and the sale of a calf, the dry 
weather and the wet. 

Only to Bruno a great aim had been set, a great hope had 
arisen. 

Before, he had worked because he was born to work ; now, 
he worked because he had a great object to attain by every 
stroke that he drove into the soil, by every heat-drop that fell 
from his brow like rain. 

There was a little piece of ground on the hill-side which 
was much neglectod, — a couple of fields, a strip of olives, and 
a breadth of wild land on which the broom and myrtle only 
grew. It ran with the land which Bruno farmed, and he had 
often looked at it longingly. 

It was allowed to go to waste in a great degree ; but Bruno 
knew the natural richness of the soil, and all that might be 
done with it ;. and it had the almost priceless advantage of a 
water-course, a mountain-fed, rush-feathered brook, running 
through it. To own a little bit of the land entirely is the pea- 
sant’s ideal of the highest good and glory everywhere in every 
nation. Nine times out of ten the possession is ruin to them- 
selves and the land too. But this they never will believe till 
they have tried it. 

It was Bruno’s ideal. 

All the other land of the hill-side was the duke’s, his pa- 
drone’s ; that he never thought of possessing any farther than 
the sort of communism of the Tuscan husbandry already ac- 
corded it to him. But this little odd nook always haunted 
and tempted him to passionate longing for it. 

It belonged to a carver and gilder down in the city. It 
was said that the man was poor and incapable, and often in 


SIGNA. 


201 


difficulty. Bruno, who was not a very good Christian in these 
matters, used to wish ardently that the difficulty might drift 
as far as bankruptcy, and so the morsel of soil come into the 
market. 

For he had an idea. 

An idea that occupied him as he drove Tinello and Pastore 
under the vines, and looked across at those ill-tilled fields, 
where the rosemary had it nearly all her own way, except 
where the bear’s berry and the wild cistus and the big sullen 
thistles and the pretty little creeping fairy-cups disputed pos- 
session. An idea that grew more alluring to him every night 
as he smoked his pipe before sleeping, and watched the first 
ripple of moonlight on the little brook under the brush-reed, 
the gardener’s rush, and the water-star. It so grew with him 
that one day he acted on it, and put on a clean blue shirt, and 
threw his best cloak over one shoulder with the scarlet lining 
of it turned back ; and, being thus in the most ceremonious 
and festal guise that he knew of, he went first to his own fat- 
tore, who was a good old man and his true friend, and then 
took his way straight down into the city. 

A few weeks later Tinello and Pastore were driven through 
the rosemary and turned it upside down, and a pruning-hook 
shone among the barren olives, and a sickle made havoc among 
the broom-reeds in the little brown stream, and the gardener’s 
rush was cut too to tie the broom-reeds up in bundles. 

There was no one there to see, except a neighboring peasant 
or two, who knew Bruno of old too well to ask him questions ; 
and the fattore, when he rattled up-hill in his little baroc- 
cino, knew what was doing, and stopped to look with approval. 

But when rumors of it in time filtered down the hill-side to 
the city market-place, — as rumors will, trickling through all 
obstacles like water, — and busybodies asked the carver and 
gilder in his dusky shop in the shadow of the Saints of Orsan- 
michele whether it were true that he had sold the land or not, 
the man said, “ No,” and said it angrily. 

“ How could any man,” he asked, “ sell any place or por- 
tion of his own in this now law-beridden country without his 
hand and seal and all his goods and chattels and his price and 
poverty being written up and printed about for any gaping fool 
to read?” 

Which was true : so the busybodies had to be content with 

I* 


202 


SIGN A. 


conjecture ; and Bruno, with whom busybodies never meddled 
any more than dogs do with a wasps’-nest, worked on the little 
nook of land at his odd hours, till the rosemary dared show 
her head nowhere, and the brook thought it only lived to bear 
brooms for the market. 

This addition made Bruno’s work more laborious than ever; 
but then it was of his own choice if he did so, and no affair of 
any one’s. Besides, no one except its own peasants ever con- 
cerned themselves with what went on upon this big, bold, lonely 
hill, with its lovely colors and fragrant smells, that had the 
sunset blaze over it every night in burning beauty in weather 
serene, or dark with storm. It was his fattore’s business only, 
and his fattore was content. 

And the carver and gilder was so, down in the city by 
Orsanmichele ; for every month on a market-day he had a little 
roll of much-soiled bank-notes, and these were so rare to him 
that they were thrice welcome. Whatever else Bruno’s secret 
might be, he kept it, — with a mountaineer’s silence, and a 
Tuscan’s reticence. 

Tinello and Pastore turned the first sod of this bit of land 
in the August when Signa was found and Gemma lost ; and 
Bruno always took an especial pleasure in sending the boy to 
work on that little brook-fed piece of the hill rather than on 
any other. 

He himself never neglected his own acres ; but he took a 
yet greater pride in this small slope, which he had made 
golden with corn, and those old rambling trees, which he 
had made bear as fine olives as any on the whole mountain- 
side. 

On great feast- or fast-days — when even Bruno (who was 
not altogether as orthodox as his Parroco said he should be, 
in being useless on the hundred odd days out of the year 
that the Church enjoins) let his plow and spade and ass and 
ox be idle — he would, as often as not, saunter down into this 
nook, taking the boy with him, and for hours would loiter 
through the twisted olive-boughs, and sit by the side of the 
pretty, shallow, swift water running on under the sun and 
shade, with the tall distaff canes blowing' above it, with a 
dieamy pleasure in it ^11, that he never took in the land, well 
as he loved it and cared for it, where his father’s fathers had 
lived and died, ever since Otho’s armies had swarmed down 


SJONA. 


203 


through the Tyrol passes and spread over the Lombard and 
the Tuscan lands. 

“ You are so fond of these thrjee fields. Why is it?” said 
Sigiia, one day, to him, when they walked through the green 
plumes of the maize that grew under the olives. 

“ They were barren ; and see what they are now. I have 
done it,” answered Bruno. 

And the boy was satisfied, and cut the brook-reeds into 
even lengths, sitting singing, with his feet in the brook and 
his face in the sun. 

He thought so little about these things : he was always 
puzzling his brain over the old manuscript music down in the 
sacristy in the Lastra. Whenever Bruno let him go off the 
hill-side he ran thither, and sat with his curly head bent over 
the crabbed signs and spaces, sitting solitary in the window 
that looked on the gravestones, with the ruined walls and the 
gateway beyond, all quiet in the sunshine. 

The music which the old Gigi had most cared for and 
copied, and gathered together in dusky, yellow piles of pages, 
was that which lies between the periods of Marcello of Venice, 
and Paesiello, and which is neglected by a careless and ingrate 
world, and seldom heard anywhere except in obscure, deserted 
towns of Italy, or in St. Peter’s itself 

There was no one to tell Signa anything about this old 
music, on which he was nourished. 

The names of the old masters were without story for him. 
There was no one to give them story or substance ; to tell him 
of Haydn serving Porpora as a slave; of Vinci, chief of coun- 
tei-point, dying of love’s vengeance ; of Paesiello gathering 
the beautiful, savage, Greek airs of the two Sicilies to put into 
his operas, as wild flowers into a wreath of laurel ; of Cima- 
rosa in his dungeon, like a blinded nightingale, bringing into 
his music all the gay, rich, elastic mirth of the birth-country 
of Pasquin and Polichinello ; of Pergolese marrying the sweet 
words of Metastasio to sweetest melody ; of the dying Mozart 
writing his own requiem ; of the little scullion, Lully, playing 
in the kitchen of the Guise the violin that the cobbler had 
taught him to use ; of Stradella, by the pure magic of his 
voice, arresting the steel of his murderer on the evening still- 
ness ol* San Giovanni Laterano ; of Pergolese breaking his 
heart under the neglect of Borne, while Borne — he once being 


204 


SIONA. 


dead — loved and worshiped, and mourned with bitter tears, 
and knew no genius like his ; of Jacopo Benedetti, the stern 
advocate, leaving the world because the thing he loved was 
slain, and burying his life in the eternal night of a monk’s cell, 
and as he penned his mighty chants, and being questioned 
wherefore, answering weeping, “ I weep, because Love goes 
about unloved.” There was no one to tell him all these things 
and make the names of his dead masters living personalities to 
him. Indeed, he knew no more than he knew the magnitude 
of the planets and distance of the stars, that these names 
which he found printed on the torn, yellow manuscripts, a 
century old or more, were of any note in the world beyond 
his own blue hills. 

But he spelt the melodies out, and was nourished on them, 
—on this pure Italian music of the Past, which has embalmed 
it in the souls of men who followed Baffaelle, and Mino, and 
Angelico, and Donatello ; and breathed in all the mountain^ 
begotten and sea-born greatness of “ il bel paese ch’ Appennine 
parte e ’1 mar circonda, e ’1 Alpe” — men who were as morning 
stars of glory, that rose in the sunset of the earlier Arts. 


CHAPTER XX. 

“ You never come to the garden now,” said Palma. “ You 
are always in the sacristy.” 

“ The music is there, and Gi^i will not let me bring it away,” 
said Signa. 

“ But what do you want with that music ?” said Palma. 
“ You make it so beautifully out of your own head.” 

Signa sighed. 

“ I learn more — playing theirs. You like my music ; but 
how can I tell ? — it may be worth nothing, it may be like the 
sound of the mule’s bells, perhaps.” 

“ It is beautiful,” said Palma. 

She did not know what else to say. She meant very much 
more than that. 


SIGNA. 


205 


Signa was fifteen now, and she was the same. 

Palma was a tall, brown girl, very strong, and somewhat 
handsome. She had her dark hair in great coils, like rope, 
round her head ; and she had an olive skin, and big brown 
eyes like a dog’s. She had a very rough, poor gown, far too 
short for her, and torn in many places ; she wore no shoes, 
and she worked very hard. 

She was only a very poor, common girl ; living on roots 
and herbs ; doing field-work in all weathers ; just knowing her 
letters, but that was all ; rising in the dark, and toiling all day 
long until nightfall, at one thing or another. And yet, with 
all that, she had a certain poetry of look in her, — a kind of dis- 
tant kinship to those old saints of Memmi’s on their golden 
grounds, those figures of Giotto’s with the fleur-de-lys or the 
palms. Most Tuscans have this still, — or more or less. 

With the rest and food that Bruno allowed to him, and the 
strong, hill air, which is like wine, Signa, from a little, thin, 
pale child, had grown into a beautiful youth : he was very 
slender, and not so strong as the young contadini round him ; 
but the clear, colorless brown of his skin was healthful ; and 
his limbs were agile and supple ; and his face had a great 
loveliness in' it, like that of Guercino’s Sleeping Endymion. 
And his empress of the night had come down and kissed him, 
and he dreamed only of her; she was invisible, yet filled all 
the air of heaven ; and men called her Music, — riot knowing 
very well of what god she comes, or whither she leads them, 
or of what unknown worlds she speaks. 

It was a noon, and Palma had snatched a moment of leisure, 
to gnaw a black crust, and to sit under the south wall, and to 
talk to Signa, who had come for melon-seeds for Bruno. 

She loved him dearly ; but he did not care very much for 
her. All the love he had in him outside his music he gave 
to Bruno. 

Bruno he had grown to love strongly since the story by the 
sea : he did not wholly understand the intense devotion of 
the man to himself, but he understood it enough to feel its 
immeasurable value. 

With Palma and him it was still the same as it had been on 
the night of the white currants and green almonds. He kissed 
her carelessly, and she was passionately grateful. They had 
been playmates, and they were often companions now. 

18 


206 


SIGNA. 


Only he thought so little about her, and so much of the 
Rusignuolo and the old music in the Misericordia Church. 

And Palma knew nothing ; which is always tiresome to one 
who knows something, and wants to know a great deal more, 
as Signa did. The lot of an eager, inquiring, visionary mind, 
cast back on its own ignorance, always makes it impatient of 
itself and of its associates. 

The boy felt like one who can see among blind people : no 
one could understand what he wanted to talk about ; no one 
had beheld the light of the sky. 

Palma indeed loved to hear his music. But that did not 
make her any nearer to him. He did not care for human ears. 

He played for himself, for the air, for the clouds, for the 
trees, for the sheep, for the kids, for the waters, for the stones ; 
played as Pan did, and Orpheus, and Apollo. 

His music came from heaven and went back to it. What 
did it matter who heard it on earth ? 

A lily would listen to him as never a man could do ; and 
a daffodil would dance with delight as never woman could ; — > 
or he thought so at least, which was the same thing. And he 
could keep the sheep all around him charmed and still, high 
above on the hill-side, with the sad pines sighing. 

What did he want with people to hear ? He would play for 
them ; but he did not care. If they felt it wrongly, or felt it 
not at all, he would stop, and run away. 

“ If they are deaf I will be dumb,” he said. “ The dogs 
and the sheep and the birds are never deaf, — nor the hills, — 
nor the flowers. It is only people that are deaf I suppose 
they are always hearing their own steps and voices and wheels 
and windlasses and the cries of the children and the hiss of 
the frying-pans. I suppose that is why. Well, let them be 
deaf Rusignuolo and I do not want them.” 

So he said to Palma under the south wall, watching a but- 
terfly, that folded was like an illuminated shield of black and 
gold, and with its wings spread was like a scarlet pomegranate 
blossom flying. Palma had asked him why he had run away 
from the bridal supper of Giruni the coppersmith’s son, just 
in the midst of his music, — run away home, he and his violin. 

“ They were not deaf,” resumed Palma. “ But your music 
was so sad ; and they were merry.” 

“ I played what came to me,” said Signa. 


SIGN A. 


207 


“ But you are merry sometimes.” 

“Not in a little room with oil-wieks burning, and a 
stench of wine, and people round me. People always make 
me sad.” 

“ Why that?” 

“ Because — I do not know : — when a number of faces are 
round me I seem stupid ; it is as if I were in a cage ; I feel 
as if God went away, farther, farther, farther !” 

“ But God made men and women.” 

“ Yes. But I wonder if the trapped birds, and the beaten 
dogs, and the smarting mules, and the bleeding sheep think so.” 

“ Oh, Signa !” 

“ I think they must doubt it,” said Signa. 

“ But the beasts are not Christians, the priests say so,” said 
Palma, who was a very true believer. 

“ I know. But I think they are. For they forgive. We 
never do.” 

“ Some of us do.” 

“ Not as the beasts do. Agnoto’s house-lamb, the other day, 
licked his hand as he cut its throat. He told me so.” 

“ That was because it loved him,” said Palma. 

“ And how can it love if it have not a soul ?” said Signa. 

Palma munched her crust. This sort of meditation, which 
Signa was very prone to wander in, utterly confused her. 

She could talk at need, as others could, of the young cauli- 
flowers, and the spring lettuces, and the chances of the ripen- 
ing corn, and the look of the budding grapes, and the promise 
of the weather, and the likelihood of drought, and the Par- 
roco’s last sermon, and the gossips’ last history of the neigh- 
bors, and the varying prices of fine and of coarse plaiting ; 
but anything else — Palma was more at ease with the heavy 
pole pulling against her, and the heavy bucket coming up 
sullenly from the water-hole. 

She felt, when he spoke in this way, much as Bruno did, — • 
only far more intensely, — as if Signa went away from her — 
right away into the sky somewhere — as the swallows went 
when they spread their wings to the east, or the blue wood- 
smoke when it vanished. 

“ You love your music better than you do Bruno, or me, or 
anything, Signa,” she said, with a little sorrow that was very 
humble, and not in the least reproachful. 


208 


SIGNA. 


“ Yes,” said Signa, witli the unconscious cruelty of one in 
whom Art is born predominant. “ Do you know, Palma,” he 
said, suddenly, after a pause, — “ do you know — I think I could 
make something beautiful, something men would be glad of, 
if only I could be where they would care for it ?” 

“ We do care,” said the girl, gently. 

“ Oh, in a way. That is not what I mean,” said the boy, 
with a little impatience which daily grew on him more, for the 
associates of his life. “ You all care ; you all sing ; it is as 
the finches do in the fields, without knowing at all what it is 
that you do. You are all like birds. You pipe — pipe — pipe, 
as you eat, as you work, as you play. But what music do we 
ever have in the churches ? Who among you really likes all 
that music when I play it off the old scores that Gigi says were 
written by such great men, any better than you like the tinkling 
of the mandolins when you dance in the threshing-barns? 
I am sure you all like the mandolins best. I know nothing 
here. I do not even know whether what I do is worth much 
or nothing. I think if I could hear great music once — if I 
could go to Florence ” 

“ To Florence ?” echoed Palma. 

It was to her as if it were a thousand leagues olf. She 
could see the gold cross, and the red roofs, and the white 
towers gleam far away in the plain against the mountains 
whence the dawn came, and she had a confused idea that 
the sun rose somehow out of the shining dome ; but it was 
to her like some foreign land : girls live and old women die 
within five miles of the cities, and never travel to see theni 
once ; to the peasant his purse, his hamlet, is the world. A 
world wide enough, that serves to hold him from his swaddling- 
bands to his grave-clothes. 

“ To Florence,” said Signa. “ There must be great music 
there. But Bruno will never let me go. If there be vege- 
tables to take to the city, he takes them himself. He says 
that cities are to boys as nets to birds.” 

“ But why ?” began Palma, having eaten her crust, and with 
her hands braiding the straws one in another. 

But Signa pursued his own thoughts aloud : 

“ There is a score of a man called Bach in the church. It 
is a part of what they call an oratorio ; a kind of sacred play, 
I suppose, that must be. It is marked to’ be sung by a bun- 


SIGN A. 


209 


dred voices. Now, to hear that — a hundred voices ! I would 
give my life.” 

“ Would it he better than to hear some one singing over the 
fields?” said Palma. 

Signa sighed. 

“ You do not understand. The singing over the fields, yes, 
that is beauti^l too. But it is another thing. Some one has 
scribbled in old yellow ink on some of the scores. In one place 
they wrote, ‘ This miserere, sung in the Sistine this Day of 
Ashes, 1722 ; fifty-five voices, very fine.’ Dear ! To hear 
that ! — it must be to the singing in the fields like the lightning 
on the hills to a glow-worm.” 

“ The lightning kills,” said Palma, meaning simply what 
she said, and not knowing that she pointed a moral in meta- 
phor. 

“ I must go back with the seeds, Palma,” said the boy, 
rising from under the old south wall. 

He was not vexed with her, only no one understood, — no 
one, as he said to the Busignuolo, when he went home with 
the basket slung at his back, playing the violin as he went 
over the hills, as his habit was, while the little children ran 
down through the vines to listen, and the sheep stood on the 
ledges of the rocks to hear, and the hollowed crevices gave the 
sound back in faint, sweet, faithful echo. 

Palma, plaiting as she walked, went to her father’s cottage, 
and laid her straw aside, and twisted her short skirt as high as 
her knees, and went down into the cabbage-bed and worked ; 
hard labor that made her back bend like an osier, and her 
brown skin wet with heat, and her feet cold and black with 
the clinging soil. 

He lived in the air, like a white- winged ft-ingiullo ; and she 
in the clods, like a poor blind mole. 

“ We are nothing to him, any one of us,” she thought, and 
a dew that was not a rain-drop fell for a moment on the crisp 
green cabbage-leaves. 

But she hoed and weeded and picked off the slugs, and 
scolded herself for crying, and labored ceaselessly all the after- 
noon over the heavy earth ; and then put a pile of the cab- 
bages into a great creel, and carried it on her back into the 
Lastra, and sold it for a few coppers ; and then went home 
again to make her brothers’ shirts, and draw the water that 

18 * 


210 


SIGNA. 


filled the troughs of hark that ran across the plot of ground, 
and clean her poor little hovel as well as she could, with five 
boys, and a pig, and hens and chickens, always sprawling on 
the floor ; and when the sun set, washed the mud off her 
limbs, and climbed the rickety ladder into the hole in the roof, 
where her straw mattress was, with two bits of wood nailed in 
the shape of a cross above it. 

Palma worked very hard. In winter, when the bitter moun- 
tain-wind was driving everything before it in a hurricane whose 
breath was ice, she had to be up and out in the frosty dark 
before day, no less than in the soft dusk of the summer dawns. 
She had all the boys to attend to and stitch for ; her father’s 
clothes to make ; the cottage to keep clean as best she might : 
she had to dig and hoe, and plant the slip of ground on which 
their food grew ; she had to help her father often in the great 
gardens : she had to stand on the square stone well, and draw 
the water up by the cord and beam, which is a hard task even 
for a man to do long together : and, finally, in all weathers, she 
had to trudge wherever she was wanted, for the good-natured 
Sandro was as lazy as he was cheery, and put labor on what 
shoulders he could, so only they were not his own. 

If ever she had a minute’s leisure, she spent it in plaiting, 
and so got a few yards done a week, and a few coppers to add 
to the household store ; for they were very poor, with that 
absolute poverty which is often glad to make soup of nettles 
and weeds ; frequent enough here, and borne with a smiling 
patience which it might do grumbling Northern folk, whose 
religion is discontent, some good to witness if they could. 

That was Palma’s life always ; day after day ; with no 
variety, except that sometimes it was cabbages, and sometimes 
lettuces, and sometimes potatoes, and sometimes tomatoes ; and 
that when the sun did not grill her like a fire, the north wind 
nipped her like a vice ; and when the earth was not baked like 
a heated brick, it was a sodden mass that she sunk into like a 
bog. That was always her life. 

Now and then she went to a festival of the saints, and put 
a flower in her rough black braids as her sole means of holy- 
day garb ; and twice a year, at Ceppo and at Pasqua, tasted a 
bit of meat. But that was all ; otherwise her round of hours 
never changed, no more than the ass’s in the brick-kiln mill. 

Nevertheless she put up her cross above her bed, and never 


SIONA. 


211 


laid herself down without thanking the Heavenly Mother for 
all the blessings she enjoyed. 

The State should never quarrel with the Churches. They 
alone can bind a band on the eyes of the poor, and, like the 
lying watchman, cry above the strife and storm of the sad earth. 
“ All’s well ! All’s well !” 

Palma never thought for a minute that her lot was a hard 
one. Her one great grief had been losing Gemma. Under all 
else she was happy enough : a brave and cheerful and kindly 
girl, and with no evil habit or coarse thought in her; and pure 
as Una, though she had to stand on the well-edge with bare 
arms and legs gleaming like bronze in the sun, and the wind 
blowing her poor thin skirt like a leaf. 

Meanwhile the boy went up the hill-side, thinking not at all 
about her. 

He was thinking of an epitaph he had seen in an old book 
the day before, — an epitaph from a tomb under an altar of St. 
Simon and St. J ude in Rome : 

“Johannes Petrus Aloysius 
Palestrina, 

Musics Princeps.” 

He was thinking how beautiful a thing it would be to die, 
if one were only sure of having “ Musicae Princeps” written 
above one’s rest under the golden glory of St. Peter’s dome. 

He was no longer content, like the boy Haydn, over a worm- 
eaten clavecin, — content with the pleasure of sound and of 
fancy, and pitying kings because they were not as he. He 
was no longer content thus. 

The desire of eternal fame — the desire of the moth for the 
star — had entered into him. 

Meanwhile, though he cried his heart out for her. Gemma 
never returned. 

Sandro came back without her, and cried a little for a week, 
but was not disconsolate, and on the whole found his nutshell 
of a house more tranquil without the little, sulky, self-willed 
beauty. But Palma mourned her long ; and her playfellows 
likewise. 

“ T was so wicked to let her go with me !” said Signa, often, 
in bitter self-reproach. But the good-natured Sandro did not 
reproach him. 


212 


SION A. 


“ My dear,” he said, “ when a female thing, however small, 
chooses to go astray, there is not the male thing, however big, 
that should ever hinder her.” 

Sandro never looked beyond his pots of pinks and beds of 
roses ; but he knew so much human truth as that. 

What Gremma had gone to, who could tell ? — wandering 
with little Savoyards and Roman image-sellers, or dancing with 
dogs and monkeys, in rainy streets of Northern towns, or under 
the striped canvas of merry-andrews’ booths ; that was what 
most of the children did who were tempted and taken over 
sea. 

“ Anyhow, wherever she is gone she is happy if she has 
got a bit of ribbon in her hair, and a sugar-plum upon her 
tongue, and she will get them for herself, I will warrant, any- 
where,” said Bruno, who could hot have honestly said that he 
was sorry she was lost. 

But Signa, when he said those things, cried so that he ceased 
to say them ; and gradually the name of the sunny-headed 
little thing dropped out of memory except with Signa and 
Palma, who would talk of her often in their leisure minutes, 
sitting under the wall by the fountain, watching the old speckled 
toads come and go, and the chaffinches preen their white wings, 
and the cistus buds unfold from the little green knots, and the 
snakes’ bread turn ruby red till it looked like a monarch’s 
sceptre dipped in the bloodshed of war. 

Whenever at night the storm howled, or the snow drifted 
over the face of the hills in winter, Signa would tremble in his 
bed, thinking of his poor lost playmate, as she might be at 
that very hour homeless and friendless on the cruel stones of 
some foreign town. His imagination tormented him with 
vision and terror of all the possible sufferings which might be 
falling to her lot. 

“ It was my fault, — ^it was my fault,” he said incessantly to 
himself and every one, and for a long time utterly refused to 
be comforted. When the great day of his first communion 
arrived, and he went, one of a long string of white-clad chil- 
dren, with his breviary in his clasped hands, and little brown 
shabby Palma behind him with the other girls, Signa felt the 
hot tears roll down his cheeks, thinking of the absent, golden- 
headed, innocent-eyed thing, who would have looked so pretty 
with the wreath of white wild hyacinths upon her head. 


SIGNA. 


213 


“ The boy is a very lamb of God: how he weeps with joy 
at entering the fold !” thought the good old Parroco from the 
hills, looking at him. • 

But Signa was thinking of Gemma. 

“ Dear love, do not fret for her,” said Teresina, that very 
day, after the service of the church, in her own little room 
over the Livornese gate ; “ never fret for her. She is one that 
will light on her feet and turn stones to almonds, always : trust 
her for that.” 

But Signa did fret ; though he knew that they were right. 
He had no thought to be unkind to those he lived with ; but 
he became so innocently and unwittingly. 

All his mind and heart were with those crabbed manu- 
scripts in the sacristy, and with the innumerable harmonies 
and combinations thronging through his brain. He wanted to 
learn ; he wanted to understand ; he wanted to know how 
others had been able to leave to the world, after their death, 
those imperishable legacies of thought and sound. He could 
only dream uselessly, puzzle himself uncertainly, wonder hope- 
lessly : he thought he had power in him to do something great, 
but how could he be sure ? 

Meanwhile he was only a little peasant, riding out with the 
barrels of wine, pruning the olives, shelling the maize, driving 
the cow up to her pasture under the pines. And Bruno said 
always, “ when you come after me,” — “ when you are a man 
grown and sell corn in the town market yourself,” — “ when 
you are old enough to go in on a Friday and barter,” — and ten 
thousand other phrases like these, all pointing to one future 
for him, as the needle points to the pole. 

The boy was heavy-hearted as he went up the hill-path. 

Sometimes he was ungrateful enough to wish that Bruno 
had never followed and found him on the sea-shore ; that he 
had wandered away with Gemma into the dim tangle of an 
unknown fate. All his affections clave to the beautiful moun- 
tain-world on which he lived ; but all his unsatisfied instincts 
fluttered like young birds with longing for far flight. 

Sometimes he wondered if there were any great man whom 
he could ask, — and was vexed that he had lost the little bit 
of paper by the water-side the night he had run from the 
Lastra. It might have been of use — who could tell ? 

“ Are you tired ?” said Bruno, that evening. “ You should 


214 


SIGNA. 


not tire. At your age I could walk from here to Prato and 
back, and never a bead on my forehead nor a muscle weary.” 

“ I am not tired,” said Signa. “ I was thinking.” 

“ You are always thinking. What good does it do ?” 

“ I was thinking : — ever so many hundred years ago, down 
in the city, I have read that three men, a Corsi, a Bardi, and 
a Strozzi, found poet and composer, musician and singers, all 
of themselves, and gave the city an opera in Palace Corsi ; 
the second it ever heard. Are there any nobles like that 
now ?” 

“ I do not know. And how can you tell what an opera 
is?” 

“ I can fancy it. Gigi has told me.” 

“ An opera is a pretty thing. I do not deny it,” said Bruno, 
too true a son of the soil to be deaf to the charms of the stage. 
“ When I was a youngster, — indeed, always before — before I 
had more to do with my money, — I was forever going down to 
get a standing-place in the summer theatre : the women round 
you, and the fine music, and the big moon overhead — oh, yes, 
I used to care for it very much ; but, after all, they are 
follies.” 

“ Would you let me go — and hear one ?” 

Signa’s eyes lit ; all the paleness and fatigue went out of his 
face ; he looked up at Bruno as a spaniel at his master. 

“ What for ?” said Bruno, sharply. “ If you want merry- 
making, they dance every night down at Fiastra, the girls and 
the boys.” 

Signa’s face fell ; he went without a word into his own little 
bedchamber. 

To jump about in the droll Tuscan rigadoon, and to whirl 
round plump Netta or black Tina, — that was not what he 
wanted. But how should Bruno understand ? 

He could hear the sound of the bell from the roof of the 
Fiastra farm, calling the dancers along the hill-side, but he shut 
his door and sat down on his bed and took out his violin. 

After all, it was the only thing that could understand 
him. 

His small square casement was open ; clematis flowers hung 
about it ; the vast plain was a vague silvery sea, full of all the 
beautiful mysteries of night. 

He played awhile, then let the Busignuolo fall upon his 


SIGN A. 


215 


knee and the bow drop. What use was it ? Who would ever 
hear it? 

The fatal desire of fame, which is to art the corroding cle- 
ment, as the desire of the senses is to love, — bearing with it 
the seeds of satiety and mortality, — had entered into him, 
without his knowing what it was that ailed him. 

When he had been a little child, he had been quite happy 
if only the sheep had heard his music and only the wandering 
water-course answered it. But now it was otherwise. He 
wanted human ears to hear ; he wanted all the millions of the 
earth to sing in chorus with him. 

And no one of them ever would. 

The power in him frightened him with its intensity and its 
longing : his genius called on him as the Jehovah of Israel 
called on the lad David ; and, at the summons of the solemn 
unseen majesty, all the childhood and the weakness in him 
trembled. 

He sat quite quiet, with the violin upon his knee, and his 
eyes staring out at the starry skies. 

The heavens were brilliant with constellations : red Antares 
flamed in the south ; the Centaur lifted his head ; and radiant 
Spica smiled upon the harvest. The moon was at the full, and 
all the sky was light, but it did not obscure “ the length of 
Ophiuchus large,” nor the many stars held in the Herdsman’s 
hand, nor the brilliancy of Altair and Vega. 

Bruno, working out-of-doors under the house-wall, heaving 
up the buckets from the tank, and watering his salad-plants in 
the evening coolness, noticed the silence. He was used to 
hear the sweet sad chords of the Rusignuolo all the evenings 
through, outstripping the living nightingales’ song. 

“ Perhaps he is beginning not to care for it,” he thought, 
and was glad, because he was always jealous of that thing, for 
whose sake the boy was so often deaf and blind to everything 
around him. 

“ When he knows what I have done,” thought he, letting 
the bucket down into the splashing water, that glittered like a 
jewel in the starlight, — “ when he knows all I have done, and 
sees his future so safe, and feels the manhood in him, and 
knows he will be his own master, then all these fancies will go 
by fast enough. Strong he never will be perha})s, and he will 
always have thoughts that no one can get at. But he will be 


216 


SIGNA. 


so happy and so proud, and his music will just be a toy for 
him, — nothing more : just a toy, as Cecco’s cliitarra is when 
he takes it up out of 'work-hours. He will put away childish 
things, — when he knows the saints have been merciful to me.” 

And he stopped to cross himself, before he took up the rope 
and drew up the pail and flung the water over the rows of 
thirsty green plants. 

The saints had been merciful to him. 

All things had thriven with him since the day he had told 
the truth in the Lastra. The seasons had been fair and pros- 
perous, the harvests large, the vintages propitious. There had 
not been one bad year, from the time he had taken the boy 
home in the face of his neighbors. Everything had gone well 
with him. It seemed to him that every grain he had put into 
the earth had multiplied a million-fold ; that every green thing 
he had thrust into the mould had brought forth and multiplied 
beyond all common increase. 

He had labored hard, doing the work of three men ; sparing 
himself no moment for leisure or recreation ; crushing out of 
himself all national inborn habits of rest or of passion ; deny- 
ing himself all indulgences of the body ; toiling without ces- 
sation when the hot earth was burning under the months of 
the lion and scorpion as when the snows drifted thick in the 
ravines of the Apennines. And now his reward was almost 
at hand. 

He almost touched the crown of all his labor. 

He thanked the saints and crossed himself, then flung the 
last shower of water over his plants, and went in-doors to his 
bed with a heart at ease. 

“ He is tired of his toy ; he is not playing,” he thought, as 
he closed the household bars and beams against the sultry 
lustre of the night, and set his old gun loaded against his side, 
and threw his strong limbs on his mattress with a sigh of 
weariness and a smile of content. 

After all, he had done well by Pippa’s child : in a very little 
while he would have bought the boy’s safe future, and housed 
it from all risks, so far as it is ever possible for any man to 
purchase the good will of fate. 

“ The saints were very merciful,” thought Bruno, and, sc 
thinking, fell into sleep with the stillness and the fragrance of 
the summer night all about him in the quiet house. 


SIGNA. 


217 


CHAPTER XXL 

Four months later, on a Sunday morning, Bruno and he 
walked to their own parish church over the plowed land for 
early mass. 

The bells were ringing all over the plains below. Their 
distant melodies crossing one another came upward on the 
cool, keen air. 

The church was exceeding old, with an upright tower, very 
lofty and ruddy-colored, and with an open belfry that showed 
the iron clapper swaying to and fro, and the ropes jerking up 
and down, as the sound of the- tolling echoed along the side 
of the hill. 

The brown fields and the golden foliage sloped above and 
below and around it. A beautiful ilex oak rose in a pyramid 
of bronzed foliage against its roof. The few scattered peas- 
ants who were its parishioners went one by one into the quiet- 
ness and darkness and stillness. The old priest and a little 
boy performed the offices. The door stood open. They could 
see the blue mountain-side and the vines and the tufts of 
grass. 

Bruno this morning was more cheerful and of more gayety 
of words than the boy had ever seen him. His character was 
deeply tinged with that melancholy which is natural to men 
of his country, where their passions are strong, and which 
lends its dignity to all the countenances of Sarto’s saints, of 
Griotto’s angels, of Fra Bartolommeo’s prophets, of Grhirlandaio’s 
priests ; countenances that any one may see to-day in the fields 
of harvest, or in the threshing-barns, anywhere where the 
same sun shines that once lit the early painters to their work. 

Bruno kneeled down on the bricks of the old hill church 
with the truest thanksgiving in him that ever moved a human 
heart ; one of the desires of his soul had been given him ; 
going through the fields he had thought, “ Shall I tell him 
yet? — or wait a little.” And he told himself to wait till he 
should get the b^ down to the borders of the brook quite in 
solitude. 


19 


218 


SIGNA. 


With labor he had compassed the thing he wished. He had 
made the future safe by the toil of his hands. He was happy, 
and he blessed God. 

Kneeling on the red bricks, with the mountain-wind blow- 
ing over him, he said to himself, — 

“ I think Pippa must know. The saints are good. They 
would tell her.” 

He breathed freely, with a peace and joy in his life that he 
had not known since the dark night when he had let the dead 
body drift out to the sea. 

A sunbeam came in through a chink in the stone wall, and 
made a little glow of silvery light upon the pavement where 
he knelt. He thought it was Pippa’s answer. 

He rose with a glad light shining in his eyes. 

“ We will not work to-day,” he said when the office was 
over. 

Usually he did work after mass. 

They went home, and they had coffee and bread. Coffee 
was a thing for feast-days. He went outside and cut a big 
cluster of yellow Muscat grapes, growing on his south wall, 
which he had left purposely when he had taken all the others 
off the vine for market. 

He laid them on Signa’s wooden platter. 

“ They are for you,” he said. “ It is fruit for a prince.” 

Signa wanted to share them with him, but he would not. 
He lighted his pipe and smoked, sitting on the stone bench 
by his door under the mulberry. Under his brows he watched 
the boy, who leaned against the table, plucking his grapes with 
one hand, and with the other making figures with a pencil on 
paper. 

Signa’s lithe, slender limbs had a girl’s grace in them ; his 
shut mouth had a sweet sereneness ; his drooped eyelids had a 
dreamy sadness ; his lashes shadowed his cheeks ; his hair fell 
over his forehead ; he was more than ever like the Sleeping 
Endymion of Guercino. 

But he was not asleep. He was awake ; but only awake in 
a world very far away from the narrow space of four walls in 
which his body was. 

“ You look like a picture there is in the city,” said Bruno, 
suddenly, who had stalked through the Tribune as contadini 
do. “ The lad in it has the moon behind him, and he dreams 


SIGNA. 


219 


of the moon, and the moon comes and kisses him, — so Cecco, 
the cooper, said, — and never of another thing did the boy 
think, sleepi>ng or waking, but of the moon, which made her- 
self a woman. Is the moon behind you ? You look like it.” 

Signa raised his head and his long dusky lashes ; he had 
not heard distinctly ; he was intent upon the figures he was 
making. 

“I have never seen the city,” he said, absently; “never 
since I used to run in, when I was little, after Baldo’s donkey.” 

“ What are you doing there ?” said Bruno, looking envi- 
ously at the pencil ; he was envious of all these unknown 
things, which he always felt were so much better loved by the 
boy than ever he was or would be himself. 

Signa colored to his curls. 

“ I was writing — music.” 

“Write music! How can you write a thing that is all 
sound ? You talk nonsense.” 

“ I think it is right,” said Signa, wistfully. “ Only I can- 
not be sure. There is nobody to tell me. Gigi thinks it is 
correct, — but impossible. He thinks no one could ever play 
it. I can play it. But then I hear it. That is different.” 

“ Hear the paper? You get crazed 1” said Bruno. “Bear, 
you get too old to dream of all this nonsense. Your Busig- 
nuolo is a pretty toy enough, and you play so that it is a joy 
to listen to you. That I grant. But it is a childish thing at best, 
and gets no man his bread. Look at the old beggar Maso who 
wanders with his flute. Music has brought him to that pass.” 

“ The beggar Maso says that men, by music, have been 
greater than kings,” murmured Signa, with his eyes dropped 
again on his score. 

“ Then he lies, and shall get a crust at this door no more,” 
said Bruno, in hot haste. 

For the world was a sealed book to him, and music a thing 
universal but of no account, like the meadow-mint that sweet- 
ened the fields ; a thing of a shepherd’s pipe, and a young 
girl’s carol, and the 'throats of villagers at Passion-week 
masses, and the mandolins of lovers and merry-makers, going 
home on St. Anna’s Eve through the vines after dance and 
drink. 

Signa sighed, and bent his head closer over his paper. He 
never disputed. He was not sure enough of the little he knew. 


220 


SIONA. 


“ You like it better than the grapes,” said Bruno, with 
vexed irritation. He had saved the grapes two months and 
more with -the thoughts of Signa’s pleasure in them always at 
his heart. It was a little thing, — a nothing. But still 

Signa folded up his paper and ate his grapes, with a flush 
almost of guilt on his face. All his soul was in the concerto 
that he was writing. 

He had found his own way through the secrets of compo- 
sition by instinct ; for genius is instinct, only a higher and 
stronger form of it than any other. The sacristan knew a 
little, — a very little ; but that little had been enough to give 
the boy a key to the mysteries of the science of sound. 

Who can think that Baffaelle would have been less Raffaelle, 
even though Sanzio had been a breaker of stones, and Peru- 
gino a painter of signs ? 

Genius is like a ray of the sun : — from what it passes through 
it will take its passing color ; but no pollution of air, of water, 
no wall of granite, no cloud of dust, no pool of mire, will turn 
it back, or make it less the sun-ray. 

Bruno blamed himself that he should have said a hasty 
word. The fire ran ofiF his tongue unawares. When all his 
heart and mind were full of the boy, he felt impatient to see 
that blank paper — those dots without meaning — raised in 
rivalry with him and outstripping him. 

“ Hear,” he said, very gently, and putting his hand on 
Signa’s shoulder, “ come down to the brook with me, will you? 
I have something to say ; and I talk best in the air, though 
talk is no great trick of mine at the best.” 

Signa rose obediently : he always obeyed. But, by sheer habit, 
he reached down the Busignuolo from the top of the chest. 

Bruno saw, and his brows drew together. 

“ Always that thing !” he thought ; but he said nothing. 

They went out into the air. 

The little brook was brimming from the autumn rains : it 
is these little brooks that bring about the great floods. The 
reeds and rushes were blowing merrily : no one cut them this 
time in the year. Bed-breasted chaffinches were bathing and 
chirping. Fir-apples were tossing down in the ripples. The 
grass was bright with the cups of the autumn anemones, in all 
colors. Bobins were singing in the olives ; and, higher, a 
cushat cooed. 


SIGNA. 


-221 


Bruno stopped and looked at it all, with a smile in his eyes, 
— a smile proud and full of peace. 

“ Sit here, dear,” he said, pushing the boy gently down on 
a large boulder of brown stone. 

He remained standing still, with always the same look in his 
eyes. 

He laid his hand on Signa’s shoulder. His voice, as he 
spoke, was low, and very soft. 

“ It is sixteen years to-day since I found you by your 
mother. She had her arm round you. You had your mouth 
at her breast. She was dead. It was the night of the great 
flood. Sixteen years ago, dear. You must be seventeen now ; 
for they said — the women who knew — that you looked a year 
old, or more, that night.” 

“ Yes?” 

Signa lifted his head and listened. All this he knew, and 
it had always a certain sharp pain for him. 

“ Yes,” said Bruno, and paused a moment. “ Sixteen yeais. 
The first nine went all wrong. But I thought I did well. I 
think Pippa sees you now, — and is content, — and quite foi- 
gives. You are a pure, good, frank boy, and fair to look at, 
and have no fault, if one may say so of any mortal thing. God 
knows I do not speak in idle praise ; no, nor in vanity. You 
are as nature made you. But your mother would be glad. 
Now, dear, listen. When one is seventeen, one is not a child 
any more : one begins to labor for oneself, to think of the 
future ! At twelve I was more a man than you are now, 
indeed ; but that — so best — so best — so best ! Keep young. 
Keep innocent. Innocence does not come back : and repent- 
ance is a poor thing beside it.” 

Signa listened, with earnest, upraised eyes, his feet hanging 
in the fast, brown water, the violin lying by him among the 
anemone-flowers and the brown plantain-stems. 

“ I have been tormented for your future,” said Bruno. 
“ Yes ; very often. For if I die to-morrow, I have thought, 
what would become of you ? — and I had nothing to lea\’o ! 
And you, — oh, you labor well and cheerfully for me, dear. I 
do not mean that ; but for others, there are stronger lads, and 
hardier, and who like field-toil more, and do not dream at all. 
And you do dream, — too much. I have been tormented often, 
when I have been roofing the stacks, and have thought, 

19 * 


222 


SIGNA. 


‘ Just a fall and a blow on the head for me, and where would 
the lad find a home?’ ” 

Signa laid his cheek against the hand that rested on his 
shoulder, — a long, brown, sinewy hand, good to grasp a weapon 
or wield a flail. 

“ For you see,” went on Bruno, his eyes shining as they 
glanced down on the boy’s face, and then at the old olive-trees 
and the brown fields corn-sown, “ while that treacherous beast 
was draining me, I could hardly keep myself together ; much 
less could I well lay by for you. A few francs in an old bag, 
at the end of a year, that was all, do what I would. But I 
had often looked at these three fields and the olives.' If I 
could get them for my own, I thought ; but it was hopeless. 
What could I do, with that snake coiling and sucking always, 
and all his brood ? But when I got you safe that day, away 
from the Lastra and Lippo, and I was all my own master, then 
I said to myself, ‘ It is possible, just possible 1’ So I went first 
to the fattore, and got his consent, and showed him my plans, 
and he had nothing against them ; and then I went down into 
the city and saw Baccio Alessi. Oh, you do not know ! That 
is the ass who let the thistles he ought to sup off choke up all 
this good soil. I went to straight in to Baccio, — the fool was 
gilding a frame, — and I put it straight before him : all I would 
give and do. I found he was half willing to sell ; wanted three 
thousand francs, — for me, he might as well have said three 
millions ! I could not get it anywhere ; even Savio would not 
lend it, though I would have worked it out — somehow. But 
I laid my plan before Baccio, we both cunning as rats, and 
slow and sure ; and at last we came to terms, hammering away 
at them far days and days. I was to have the land to farm, 
in the way that seemed best to me ; and I was to give him 
half I got oiF it for ten years, and two hundred and fifty francs 
a year as well, paid monthly ; and at the end of the ten years 
the ground was to be mine, — mine, — mine !” 

Bruno stopped ; his breath came quickly ; his hand tight- 
ened on the boy’s shoulder. 

Signa looked up, listening, but calmer than Bruno had 
fancied he would be. To him it was such a gigantic thing, 
and so marvelous ; he wondered the boy could hear it and keep 
so quiet and sit so still. 

You know all I have done , to the land,” he pursued. “ You 


SIGNA. 


223 


can see. You are farmer enough to judge that, my dear. 
But I have never neglected anything on the old soil, no, — 
Savio says that. He is quite content that it is as it is. He 
praises me to the padrone ; only the padrone is so gay and 
young ; it is no matter to him. Now, when that fool Baccio 
yonder saw what his half became, and all I got out of his 
ground, he was for being off his bargain. Of course. But I 
have him tight, hand and seal, and good testimony to it. A 
Tuscan is no bird to catch with chaff. He was grieved in his 
soul, I can believe, when he saw all the land would give. But 
that of course was no business of mine. Now, this last sum- 
mer — the saints are good to one — Baccio, who is a shiftless 
dolt, and leaks on all sides like a rust-eaten pipkin, got deeper 
and deeper into his troubles, and was as wellnigh being sold 
up by his creditors as a man can be to keep head above water 
at all. Now, dear, you have never been stinted for anything ? 
No ? You have had all the food you wished for, and all the 
leisure time you wanted, and I do not think you have ever had 
a narrow measure of anything ? Nevertheless, I saved money. 
When Savio had taken his dues, and Baccio had had his 
month’s portion, I was always able to put away something in 
that old copper pot, that I slip in the chimney, where nobody 
ever would look for it ; not even a magpie. So, when I heard 
the fool was so nigh his rope’s end, I counted my money. I 
had six hundred francs, and there were two years to run under 
Baccio. I went down and saw him. I told him I would give 
him the money down if the land were made mine at once. The 
poor devil sprang at the chance. He thought the money 
would help him over the bog of his debts ; and he knew in a 
month or two, if I did not have his bit of land, the creditors 
would take it and divide it between them. So he asked nothing 
better than to do what I wished. He had lost the courage to 
higgle. I paid him the money down on the nail, and the 
notary made the ground over to me, for ever and ever. Do 
you understand, dear? It is mine !” 

Signa smiled up in his eyes. 

“ How glad I am — if you are glad !” 

“ If I am glad !” 

Bruno looked at him bewilderedly. Was the lad stupid or 
blind, that he did not know, — that he did not guess? and 
with those three fair fine fields of wheat, and those good olives 


224 


SIQNA. 


round him in the sun as fair and as plain to be seen as the gold 
disk round the head of the Gesu child on the altars ? 

“ Glad !” he echoed ; “ be glad for yourself too, dear. Do 
you not understand ? What is mine is yours. I have worked 
the land for you. It shall be your inheritance, Signa. No, 
rather, when you are of age, my dear, I shall make it over to 
you, in your own name, and then you will be your own mas- 
ter, Signa. Your own master — do you understand?” 

Signa sprang up and threw his arms round the man’s brown 
neck. 

“ You are so good, — so good ! To care for me like that ; 
to think so much : to work so hard. Oh, what can I say in 
answer?” 

Bruno was silent. He was always ashamed of emotion, and 
he- was vaguely disappointed. What the boy felt was grati- 
tude, not joy ; not, in any way, the great enraptured pride of 
possession which Bruno had expected would have filled his 
young heart to overflowing. 

For seven years he had toiled night and day, and denied 
himself all rest of the body or pleasure of the senses, that he 
might make this one portion of mother earth his own. And 
now, the boy loved him for his love indeed ; but for the gift — 
did he care for it ? Not so much as he did for the gift of a 
blank sheet of paper to scrawl signs on. Notone tithe as 
much as he had cared for the gift of the old brown wooden 
Busignuolo. 

He put Signa gently away from him, and sat down also by 
the side of the singing brook. 

“ You do not quite understand,” he said, and his voice had 
a changed sound in it, and his throat felt dry. “ Dear, you 
are seventeen, as I said, and it is time to think of the future. 
Now, that is why having this land makes me so much at 
peace. Do you not see ? It will be all your own ; and on it 
alone a man could live. Oh, yes, live well, if we build up a 
little house on it, and the stones lie so near hereabouts, and 
Savio would get me leave to take them, and there is a brambly 
corner there by the last olive. But that is not what I am 
thinking of ; I dare say I shall live to be old ; I am tough as 
an ox ; and threatened men never die, they say, and so many 
would like to stick a knife in me. Still, anything may happen. 
And now, what I mean is this : this land shall be yours, your 


SION A. 


225 


own entirely, as fast and as sure as the notaries can bind it ; 
and then, when I do die, you learning to be a good husband- 
man, and having all the produce of your own fields to do as 
you like with, and so getting to care for the work as you do 
not yet, because you are so young, Savio will let you stay on 
in my place in the old cottage, where your mother was born ; 
and you will marry, and have children, and grow a rich con- 
tadino ; and there is no better life under the sun, no, not any- 
where ; and so your future is safe, my dear, do you see ? and 
that is why I thank God. Because I have lain awake many 
an hour, saying to myself, ‘ If 1 should die to-morrow, or be 
killed in a brawl, what would the boy do T But now you are 
safe, quite safe for all your life long, because you have your 
own bit of l^nd to live on and get your bread out of, and that 
is the sweetest thing that the world holds for any man ; and 
so I bless the saints that they have let me get it for you, and 
— and I think Pippa knows.” 

His voice fell low, and he uncovered his dark curly head, 
and made the sign of the cross on his breast. 

The boy kissed his hand, — but was quite silent. 


CHAPTER XXIl. 

“ Is it not good, Signa?” said he, after he had borne the 
silence a little time with no answer but the cooing of the dove 
in the cranberry-bushes. 

Signa laid his head against Bruno’s arm, as a girl would 
have done. 

“ You are good !” 

“ No, I was never that,” said Bruno, with some of his old 
roughness. “ But the life for you will be good, the best the 
woidd holds, — owing nothing to any man, and all to the work 
of one’s own hands and the good black mould that feeds one’s 
hunger all one’s years and covers one’s nakedness when one is 
dead. Ah, dear, I think you are so young you do not see 
how great a thing it is to set your foot on a bit of the earth and 

K* 


226 


SIGN A. 


say, ‘ This is mine !’ A king cannot say any more. Only, 
the king puts dead men into it, and we put the seed that is 
life.” 

Signa was silent. He was thinking that he knew a greater 
thing : to be king in a realm that conquerors cannot assail, in 
a world that the lives around cannot enter. 

He was oppressed and frightened by this, which Bruno had 
meant should be the crown and joy of his sum of seventeen 
years. It was as if the weight of the earth bestowed on him 
was heavy on his heart. 

To get rich, — to marry, — to have children. The common 
ideal of human kind appalled the pure and lofty fancies of the 
boy. 

To live and die a tiller of the soil, the common lot of the 
common mortal, terrified the young soul which had believed 
itself the care of angels. 

He felt as if a great chain had been flung round him, fast- 
ening him down on to the hill-side. And yet what could he 
say to this unchangeable unselfish devotion which had thought 
to benefit him ? 

He sat and looked at the brown running water, as it rip- 

f )led over his feet and the wind blew among the rushes. He 
oved every rood of the land, and every cloud-mist that floated 
over it, and every little humble flower that helped to make 
the soil beautiful ; he loved the great dusky pine woods above 
his head, and the old roofs and towers by the river in the 
plain far below ; he loved the roads he had run on with a 
baby’s feet, and the blue mountains that he had worshiped 
with a poet’s heart; he loved them all with passion and 
fidelity. 

And yet this future of which Bruno spoke as a supreme 
mercy of heaven oppressed him with a deadly sense as of im- 
prisonment. 

Bruno watched him, and saw nothing of what he felt; he 
only saw the troubled shadows that had come instead of the 
cloudless sunshine which he had thought to see dawn on the 
boy’s face. He was struck dumb with amaze ; he was morti- 
fied to the quick ; he was nearer to rage against Signa than 
ever he had been in all his life. 

What could it mean ? 

He had given the boy a priceless gift, — a treasure that moth 


SIONA. 


227 


could not eat nor rust corrupt ; he had made safe his future at 
the cost of seven years of incessant toil and unending self- 
denial. And this was all, — silence ! only silence ! as though 
he had said to the child, as Abraham to Ishmael, “ Arise, and 
depart from me.” 

He had come down to the side of the brook at peace with 
heaven and all men ; he had rejoiced with the pure joys of an 
unselfish sacrifice and of a duty fulfilled ; he had counted for 
years on the pleasure of this one moment ; he had said to him- 
self ten thousand times, plowing in the rain and wind or rising 
in the stormy dusk of winter dawns, “ How happy the boy will 
be ! — how happy !” 

And now the gift was given, and Signa sat silent, watching 
the brook run by. 

He thought it must be because Signa did not understand. 

He spoke again, twisting the rushes to and fro in his right 
hand. 

“ Look here,” he said ; “ perhaps you do not see. I think 

you are not glad. It is strange. What other lad Do 

you know all it means to have a bit of land of your own ? 
You cannot, I think. It means freedom. You would be a 
poor man with only this, that I know ; but you would never 
need to starve, and you would be always free. No beggar, 
and no bondsman, — always free. Do you understand what 
that means ? You are seventeen. Some day you will see a 
girl you want. Listen. When Pippa was but a child, — not 
twelve, I think, — I loved a woman — not the first I loved, nor 
yet the last, may Heaven be merciful to my sins ! but the 
best, — ^yes, the one I loved the best. The girl was poor, a 
daughter of many; her father a shepherd up above there. 
She was called Dina. I think she was not handsome ; but 
she was like a wild rose, — yes, just like that; a thing you 
could not be rough with ; a thing that made all the air round 
her sweet. I loved her best of all. Well, well ; you do not 
know. You will know. If I had married her, all would have 
gone right. She could keep me from fair and fray, from riot 
and quarrel, as none of the others ever could. I would have 
married her. But I was one among many, working on the 
same soil. My father said, ‘ How bring another mouth, when 
there was not enough for the mouths there were ? There was 
not room for a mouse the more in the old house. Dina had 


228 


SIGNA. 


nothing but the poor rough shift and gown she wore.’ He 
would not hear of it ; so I never married Dina. We met by 
stealth up in yon pines. We loved each other. Trouble 
came. You are too young. Never mind. Dina died of it in 
the end, a year later, — that was all. And there was no soft 
little white soul between mine and the devil any more. I let 
myself go to all the evil that chose to come in my path. I 
stabbed and cursed and gambled and rioted, and made men 
afraid of me and women rue me. If I had married Dina, — 
I never saw any other woman that I cared to marry ; nay, I 
would have given none the place that ought to have been 
Dina’s. Sometimes I go up and look at where she lies still, in 
that little square place with the white walls round it, right up 
there under the pines, where you see the cloud now, — that 
cloud that has come down and past the mountain. Yes, up 
there. Sometimes I can feel her arms about my throat, and 
feel her kiss me still. I never think of any of the others. 
But you do not understand. What I meant to say was, if I 
had had a little piece of ground like this, and had not been 
but one among so many, I should have married Dina, and 
she might not have died. God knows, at least, I should not 
feel it in the way I feel it now, that it was I who brought her 
death on her ; and I should have lived with cleaner soul and 
straighter steps, I think. Now, you, dear, you are a gentle 
boy, and tender of nature, and will love some girl more inno- 
cently than ever I did. And when we have built your little 
house, — ^just see how it will stand, with the sunrise always in 
face of it, which will please you so ; and that curve of the hill 
to keep it from the northerly storms, — why, then, I say, you 
can bring home any honest, pretty maiden that you take a 
fancy to, and need not ask my will nor any one’s, but can live 
God-fearing and wholesomely all your days, instead of being 
cast adrift on lame chances and blind passions. For you are 
not very strong, my boy, and a tranquil life will be the best 
for you ; and then, when death does come to you, and you see 
your mother face to face at last, why, then you will say to her 
that I kept you out of hell, though I could not' keep myself. 
And I shall not mind hell, dear. No ! let it burn me as it 
may, if only they leave me just a little light, so that I can 
look up and see you happy by God’s throne, — you and my poor 
Dina. A man can be a man in hell, I think.” 


SIGNA. 


229 


His voice ceased. 

What he spoke of was no metaphor to him, but dark, dread 
truth, as sure to come to pass as night to follow day. 

Signa looked, half tearfully, up into his face. What could 
the boy say ? 

He only vaguely understood all that the strength and the 
weakness, the sternness and the tenderness, the force and the 
frailty of this man’s soul wrestled with and overthrew. He 
only felt the dead weight of a future that appalled him being 
forced on him by the hands that were stretched out to give him 
blessing. 

A bitter sense of his own cruel thanklessness, and of his 
impotence to make himself more thankful, choked up in his 
heart all other emotions. 

He was mute a little while, his chest heaving and his eyes 
burning with an insufferable shame at his own ingratitude. 
Then all at once he threw up his head, and spoke with the 
desperate pain of one who feels himself most utterly unworthy, 
yet is carried out of himself by the force of a passion stronger 
than his will. 

“ What can I say?” he cried. “ Oh, how good you are to 
think so of me and never once of yourself ! And any other 
boy — oh, yes, I know — any other than I would be so happy 
and so proud. You must hate me, because I am so thankless. 
No, not thankless in my heart. Most thankful ; only it is not 
what I want. It sounds so vile to say so, and you toiling and 
saving, and thinking only of me and of my future all those 
years. But one is as one is made. You know the rose could 
not live the water-life of the rush, the dove could not burrow 
in the moss and sand like the mole. We are as we are made. 
We cannot help being rose or rush, dove or mole. Something 
does it for us, — God, they say. Only one wonders. You must 
hate me, so cold as I seem, and so base, and so callous, and 
you thinking only of me all these years, and giving up your 
life for mine. But it is better to tell you the truth, and you 
will try and forgive it, because I cannot help it. It is stronger 
than I am. I do not want any land nor any girl. I do not 
want to be a contadino always, living and dying. I should do 
no good. I love this hill-side — ah, dearly ! I would spend all 
my life upon it. But then not in the way you wish. Only when 
I should have learned all I want, and should come home here 

20 


230 


SIQNA. 


, for ever and ever, and watcli the sunrise, and make music all 
day long that should go away to all the ends of the earth and 
take the name of Signa with it, and make it great everywhere 
in men’s mouths. But to stay here now and always, never 
knowing anything, never hearing a mass sung, nor a cantata 
played, nor an opera given, never doing anything except put 
the grain in and reap it, and dig round the olives and trim 
them, — oh, I would rather you would throw me in the brook 
and fling stones on me till I should be dead. When I take 
the cattle out, I do not think of them ; I think of the music 
that is always about me, all around me, everywhere. I love 
the land, but it is because of its beauty I love it ; of plowing 
and weeding, and watering and stacking, — I help you because 
I ought to do it ; but my heart is not in my body while I do 
do it. My heart is with the birds, with the clouds, with the 
stars, — anywhere, — but never in the labor at all. If I were 
alon,e here in other years, as you say, I should let the briers 
and the rosemary eat it all up, as Baccio did. Oh, listen, do 
listen, and do not be angry. What I w^ant to do is to learn ; 
to hear beautiful things, and see if I cannot make more beau- 
tiful things myself. I have heard that there are schools of 
music, where one can know what one is worth. I play the 
old great things the great masters wrote, and when I play them, 
then my heart is in my body, and my soul seems to live in my 
hands. I cannot help it. The only thing I care for in all the 
world is music, and I do think that Grod has meant me to give my 
life to it for the world. You remember what that stranger said 
when I sang to him when I was only a child. I do not want 
my mouth to drop pearls. I do not want gold, or pleasure, or 
comfort. But if I could go away where I could learn. I 
have written, — but I do not know what it is worth. If I could 
go away where I could hear great things, and study them, then 
I think I could make you proud of me, — then I think I could 
honor the Lastra. Oh, listen, listen, listen ! I am not thank- 
less, indeed. But what I want is to have the beautiful things 
that I hear live after me. I would die a thousand deaths, if 
it were possible, so that only I could give life to them, and 
know that the world would say, ‘ He was only a little lad, — 
he was only Signa, — but his music was great.’ ” 

Then his voice ceased quite suddenly, and he dropped his 
face on his hands and trembled. For he was afraid of the 


SIGNA. 


231 


fruit of his words ; and his unthankfulness made his soul 
black and loathsome in his own sight. 

At the first phrase Bruno had sprung to his feet, and had 
all the while stood looking down on him, not breaking in upon 
him by a breath or by a sign. Only over his face there had 
come the old darkness that had been banished so long; his 
eyes under the straight black line of his brows had the old 
murderous fire in them. 

He listened to the end. 

Then he set his heel on the violin, which lay on the sedges 
at his feet, and stamped it down again and again as if it had 
been a snake. 

“ Accursed be the toy that has bewitched you ! — accursed 
the gold that bought it, and the man that gave !” 

The bruised wood cracked and broke under his heel ; a 
single string snapped, with a shrill, sad, shivering sound, like 
the cry of some young thing dying. The boy sprang erect, 
his fair face in a blaze of wrath and horror, his slender hands 
clijiched. For a moment they looked at one another, — a sullen 
gloom set in the man’s flaming eyes ; a wild reproach and a 
hopeless defiance in the boy’s. 

Then Signa’s arms dropped, and he flung himself on his 
ruined treasure, covering it with kisses, weeping as girls weep. 

Bruno looked down on him, and the fierce scorn on his face 
deepened, and he laughed aloud. 

Mourn in despair for a broken plaything, and slay without 
thought a love that would burn in hell through all eternity to 
serve him ! 

Without a word he turned and went up the mountain-side. 

The boy lay face downwards in the grass, sobbing, with the 
shattered wood under his quivering lips. 

Bruno never looked back. 


232 


SIGNA. 


CHAPTER XXril. 

It was night when Signa crept back from the side of the 
brook to the house. 

The sun had left a stormy red over the mountains. In the 
valley it was raining heavily. The wind blew from the west. 
The bells were ringing for the benediction through the dense 
violet-hued vapors. 

The poor peasant who most often aided Bruno on his fields 
was putting up the bin before the oxen’s stable. 

He turned his lantern to the boy, and nodded. 

“ You will be up by dawn, Signa — will you ? It is too much 
for me to do alone.” 

The boy stopped, shading his face from the lantern, lest the 
man should see his swollen eyelids and his pallid cheeks. 

“ Is Bruno gone ?” he asked. 

“Yes. Hid you not know ? But there ! he never says 
anything. It is his way. How your voice shakes ! You 
have got a chill. Yes. He came down from the mountains 
an hour ago and told me he should be away a day, — two days, 
— perhaps more. Would I sleep in the house and see to 
things? No offense. But you are no more than a baby. 
Mind the guns are loaded ; and leave the wine where I can 
get it easy if you go to bed.” 

Signa locked himself in his little room, heeding neither the 
guns nor the wine. 

All night the rain beat against his lattice and the winds 
raged over the roof. All night he tried by the light of a feeble 
little lamp to mend his shattered Rusignuolo. 

It was quite useless. The wooden shell he could piece to- 
gether well enough ; but the keys were smashed beyond all 
chance of restoration, and for the broken silver string there 
was no hope. 

The Rusignuolo was mute for evermore, — as mute as a dead 
bird. 

Signa never slept, nor even undressed. He sat looking at 
the violin with a sick, dead apathy of pain. 


SIGNA. 


233 


He watched by it as a bird living will watch by the dead 
one which has been its comrade in song and flight, and never 
more will spread wing with him or praise the day beneath the 
summer leaves. 

When the morning came and the peasant flung a shower of 
pebbles at his shutter to rouse him, he was still sitting there, 
tearless and heart-broken, with the fragments of the Rusignu- 
olo before him. 

The habits of his life were strong enough to make him rise 
and dip his head in water and shake his hair dry, and go down 
and help the man in his stable- and field-work. But first he 
laid the violin reverently, as though he buried it, in a drawer, 
where his rosary and his communion-ribbon and his book of 
hours and his little locket were all laid with sprigs of fir and 
cypress and many rose-leaves to keep them sweet. His face 
Wiis very white : he had a scared, appalled look in his eyes, 
and he hardly spoke. 

The peasant asked him if he had seen a ghost in the night. 

Signa shook his head ; but he thought that he had heard 
many, — ^ghosts of his silent melodies, ghosts of his dead dreams, 
ghosts of all the gracious, precious, nameless, heaven-born 
things that he and the Busignuolo together had called to them 
from the spirit-world, from the shadows and the storms, from 
the stars and the sun. 

The long, dreary, dull day dragged out its weary length. It 
had ceased to rain, but the valley was hidden in vapor. He 
could not see the river, or the villages, or the distant gleam of 
the golden cross. Dusky mists, white and gray, floated along 
the face of the mountains, and rose like a dense smoke from 
the plains. 

He helped the peasant all the day, his own peasant training 
teaching him by instinct to labor whilst he suffered. He fed 
the beasts, and plucked up the beet-root, and drew water, and 
stacked wood, and did whatever the man told him to do. 

No one came near. The hill-side was still as a grave. The 
fog drifted beneath it, and hid the rest of the world. He and 
the man worked on alone. The oxen lowed in the byre, miss- 
ing their master. The screech-owl, finding it so dark, began 
to hoot. A great awe, like that of the sight of death, weighed 
upon Signa. 

He feared everything, and yet he feared nothing. 

20 * 


234 


SIGN A. 


The Rusignuolo was ruined and voiceless. 

It seemed to him as if the end of the world had come. 

He went up the stairs and looked at it often. No tears 
would come to his eyes ; but his heart felt as if it would burst. 

Never again would it speak to him. 

Never ! 

A dull aching hatred of the man who had done this evil rose 
up in him. Hatred seemed to him like a crime, — after all that 
he owed to him ; but it was there. 

He was unutterably wretched. 

If there had been any one he could have spoken to, it might 
have been better ; but the only thing that had ever understood 
him was dead, — lying mute and broken among the rose-leaves. 

He could only work on silently, with his heart swelling in 
him, and let the horrible gray hours come and go. 

The peasant wondered fifty times, if once, where Bruno 
could be gone, — Bruno, who, for forty-nine years, never had 
set foot off his own hill and valley, save that once to the sea. 

But Signa answered him nothing. He did not care. He 
did not ask himself If Bruno were dead — the Rusignuolo 
was dead. It would be only justice. 

The boy’s heart was cold and numb. 

The Rusignuolo was dead, and all his hopes and all his 
dreams and all his faiths dead with it. 

“ Why did he take me out of the flood?” he thought, as he 
looked down into the dull vapors of the great rain-clouds that 
hovered between him and the plain. 

There is a silence of the mountains that is beautiful beyond 
all other beauty. There is another silence of the mountains 
that is lonely beyond all other loneliness. 

The latter silence was about him now, with the world of 
water and mist at his feet, — that dim white gray world in 
which he might have drifted away with his mother — but for 
Bruno. 

“ Why did he save me, then,” he thought, ‘‘ if he must kill 
all that is worth anything in me now ?” 

And his heart grew harder against Bruno with each hour 
that went by, and brought the wet, oppressive, sullen evening 
round again, with the wind loud among the pines. 

The boy looked out through the iron bars of his open lat- 
tice into the cold still night, full of the smell of fallen leaves 


SIGNA, 


235 


and fir-cones. The tears fell down his cheeks ; his heart was 
oppressed with a vague yearning, such as made Mozart weep 
when he heard his own Lacrimova chanted. 

It is not fear of death, it is not desire of life. 

It is that unutterable want, that nameless longing, which 
stirs in the soul that is a little purer than its fellow, and which, 
burdened with that prophetic pain which men call genius, 
blindly feels its way after some great light, which it knows 
must be shining somewhere upon other worlds, though all the 
earth is dark. 

When Mozart wept, it was for the world he could never 
reach, — not for the world he left. 

With the morning Palma came up ; the same weather lasted, 
but weather did not matter to her. She came for sticks and 
fir-cones for her firing, which she could glean above on the 
wild ground. Usually Signa helped her. Now he murmured 
that he had too much to do, and let her go up under the trees 
alone in the falling rain. 

What was Palma to him, or any living thing ? the Rusig- 
nuolo was ruined. 

He sat on the low stone wall with the pain on him, and 
left all his work undone. 

The absence of Bruno weighed on him with a vague sense 
of misfortune and fear, and yet he did not wish him to return ; 
he wished him to keep away, — always, always, always, he 
thought ; how should he bear to see the man who had slain 
his Rusignuolo, and how could he ever avenge it on the man 
who had e:iven him bread and shelter and love, and almost 
life? 

The boy’s heart was sick with sorrow, and with the first 
bitterness of wrath that had ever found resting-place in him. 

He wished that he were dead ; he wished that he had never 
lived. 

Palma came down from the higher ground under the pines, 
with a sack of fir-apples on her shoulders, and a great bundle 
of dry boughs and brambles balanced above it on her head. 
Her feet were black with the moss and the mud ; her wisp of 
a skirt was clinging to her, wet through ; her brown face was 
warm with work. She stopped by the wall. 

“ Is anything the matter?” 

Signa shook his head ; he could not speak of it. 


236 


SIGNA. 


“ Cippone told me Bruno was gone away,” she said, — • 
meaning the man in the field. “ Is that true?” 

“ Yes, it is true.” 

“ Then there must be something.” 

Signa was silent, sitting on the wall with his wet hair blow- 
ing about him. 

Palma rested her sack and her fagot on the stone parapet, 
and looked anxiously in his averted face. 

“ Dear Signa, do tell me.” 

“ It is nothing,” said Signa, slowly ; “ only he is a brute, — 
he kills what is greater than himself ; and I hate him.” 

“ Oh, Signa !” 

The girl’s sunburned cheeks grew ashen : the slowness 
and coldness of his answer frightened her more than any out- 
burst of wild grief or rage would have done. It was so un- 
like him. 

“ I hate him !” said Signa. “ Palma, see here. He pre- 
tends to love me, and he breaks my Busignuolo, and he breaks 
my heart with it ; and he thinks he loves me, both body and 
soul, because he buys a bit of land and bids me live on it all 
the days of my life, and dig, and sow, and plo-w, and hew, and 
draw water, and lead a life like the oxen’s, — no better : he 
calls that love. To do with me exactly what he wishes him- 
self! To make a mule of me, — a mule, — a stupid plodding 
thing, mute as the stones : he calls that love.” 

“ Oh, Signa 1” 

She could say nothing else. She was so amazed and so 
aghast, that all her love of the soil as a Tuscan, and all her 
instincts of class and of custom as a peasant, were roused in 
horror at him. Only she was so fond of him. She could not 
think him wrong. She had a true woman in her, this poor 
brown girl, who went half naked in the wind, and bore her 
burdens on her back like any beaten ass. 

“ Oh, Signa 1” echoed the boy, impatient of her tone, toss- 
ing his wet hair out of his eyes. “ Oh, no doubt you think 
my gratitude is as poor as his love. No, it is not. If it had 

been any one else, I am only seventeen, and not strong, 

they say, but I would have found some way to kill what killed 
my Busignuolo. Oh, I know he took me out of the flood, — 
off my dead mother’s breast, — and has been good — very 
good ; and I have loved him. But now, because I cannot 


SJGNA, 


237 


promise him to live as he lives, because I cannot choke the 
music out of me, because I want to go away, and see whether 
what I do is worth anything or worth nothing, because I feel 
I could be great as Gigi says that Paesiello and Palestrina 
and Pergolesi were, — now he turns against me, now he is a 
brute, now he breaks the violin under his heel as if it were 
an empty husk of maize ! And then he calls that love ; and 
you look at me in horror, as if I were some heartless thing, 
because I would sooner any day have my lute than such a 
love as that, to set its foot upon my throat and keep it mute, 
as the kite sets its claw into the thrush’s !” 

He spoke with vivid, tremulous, petulant passion, — the first 
passion that had ever convulsed the tender, dreamful youth 
of him ; all the color flushed back into his face, his mouth 
quivered, his eyes flashed fire through the rain. 

Palma listened with great terror in her. But she was a 
brave girl, and swift to reason and to see the right. 

“ Is your gratitude so much more real than his love ?” she 
said, quickly, and then was sorry that she had said it, fearing 
it too harsh. 

Signa winced a little, struck home by a sudden consciousness. 

“ You cannot buy gratitude,” he said, angrily. “ I was 
grateful, heart and soul, and I would have died for him two 
days ago. But now he has forfeited all that. I hate him ! 
I hate him !” 

“ Does a moment’s rage outweigh sixteen years’ love so 
soon ?” 

“ He broke the Busignuolo,” said Signa ; and his fair mouth 
set with stern severity, that gave him for the moment almost 
the look of manhood. 

Palma looked at him, and thought how beautiful his face 
was ; her eyes filled with tears. 

“ What do you want ? — To go away ?” 

“ To go away now, that I may come back great.” 

“ Are people happier that are — what you call great ?” 

“ Happy ! that I do not know ; perhaps not. I dare say 
not. What does that matter ? It is not to have lived in 
vain. Not to be put under the sod like a dead horse. Not 
to be forgotten while there are men on the earth. It is to 
do the thing one has it in one to do ; to see the sun always 
while other people stare at the dust. It is — it is — oh, what 


238 


SIGNA. 


is the use of talking? You never would know; you never 
understand.” 

“No, dear,” said Palma, with a sigh ; “ and what does 
Bruno want of you ?” 

“ To live as he does. To he a contadino always. He has 
bought that bit of land for me by the brook, — you know it ; 
he would give it me for my own ; and when I am a man I am 
to live there, and take some girl as my wife, and so be safe, as 
he calls it, and happy, as he thinks ! That is what he has 
laid out for me. That is what he wants.” 

Palma colored to the roots of her dusky rippling hair, and 
then grew very pale, as pale as her olive skin could be. 

“ And all that does not please you?” 

“ Please me ! Oh, Palma, when one has the song of the 
angels always in one’s ear !” 

His mouth trembled, his voice faltered : how could he say 
what was in him ? the force greater than himself that drove 
him on ? the futile despair at his own powerlessness to alter 
his fate, which made him heart-sick at this future, which they 
all thought so fair ? 

Palma did not understand. A sickly pain settled over her, — 
a sense of isolation and of immeasurable distance from the 
other life which had grown up with her own among the flowers 
of Giovoli. 

Besides, to have a bit of land, and dwell on it, and die on 
it, — that seemed to her, as it had seemed to Bruno, the verv 
sum and crown of human desire. 

The “ sublime discontent” which stirred in fhe young soul 
of Sign a was as far from any range of her vision as were the 
angels’ songs he said he heard. 

She believed in the angels, indeed ; but for her they were 
mute. For her they ever abode beyond the great white clouds, 
invisible and silent. 

She did not speak for a little time. Then she rose, and left 
her sack and her fagot on the wall. 

“ It is true, dear. I do not understand. I am stupid, I 
dare say. I will just go in and see if there is anything to do 
in the house. I can stay a very little while. I have every- 
thing to do at home, father is so busy taking the lemons in- 
doors.” 

Signa let her go. He was looking through the still falling 


SIGNA. 


239 


rain at the n.ountains, where he could no longer see the sun- 
rise, and at the plain where the golden cross was still behind 
the mist. 

When he had had the Rusignuolo with him, he had never 
cared whether there was rain or sun. 

Palma went into the house, and, like the laborious and 
cleanly creature that she was, found much to do with broom 
and pail and duster ; made a fire underneath the cold soup- 
pot, cut fresh vegetables into it, and scoured out the pots and 
platters of daily use which were lying foul about the place. 
She was accustomed to such work, and could get through it 
quickly. 

She worked hard and fast, the tears swimming in her eyes 
all the while. She did not know very well what ailed her. 
She only knew that Signa wanted to go away, — that the life 
which seemed so natural and so good to them all was a thing 
impossible to him. 

She loved him better than all her brothers ; and it had hurt 
her curiously to hear him talk with such scorn of the little 
house that Bruno would have built for him on the hill by the 
brook, and of the girl that in time might have dwelt with him 
there in face of the great glad sunrise. 

It was not that she thought she could have been chosen to 
be that girl, — oh, no ! Nevertheless it hurt her with a dull 
and confused pain. Besides, she felt that he was wrong ; and 
she did battle with herself whether she ought or ought not tc 
tell him so. 

She decided to tell him. Signa seemed, to her sturdier, 
stronger, lower nature, like some beautiful, delicate sky song- 
bird, that a rough word would scare and drive away like a 
shower of stones. He was so unlike them all. To Palma, * 
who only saw her cabbages, and her broom, and her water- 
bucket, those eyes of his, which were always looking upward 
and seeing such beautiful things in the clouds and the sun- 
beams, seemed like those of a young saint. 

If the Church had made him “ beato,” she would not have 
been astonished ; she would have worshiped him honestly, and 
besought his intercession with that God whom he was always 
so near. 

And yet now she knew he was in the wrong, and she 
wrestled with herself, scouring out the metal pans, whether it 


240 


SIGNA. 


were her bounden right to tell him so, or whether she might 
without cowardice hold her peace. And perhaps he would 
only laugh her to scorn ; she knew she was stupid, except just 
for this rude hand-labor, and that she knew nothing at all, not 
even her letters all through, and that she had never seen any- 
thing except this green hill and the walls of the Lastra ; while 
Signa knew so much, — :SO much ! — and had been as a child to 
the city and to the sea, and now eould tell one so many things 
about the old walls that for him had tongues, and the ways of 
the birds and the beasts on the mountains, and had read all 
the lives of the saints, and could see right away into heaven 
when he had the dream-look in his eyes, — so she thought. 

Nevertheless, being a brave girl, and with a resolute heart, 
her conscience would not let her keep mute. When she had 
done the house up tidily, and even put a new sprig of bay 
under the Madonna, she went out into the air. The rain had 
ceased, but the white mist was hanging everywhere. Signa 
still sat looking down into the vapors of the plain. She 
touched him timidly. 

“ Dear, do not be angry with me ; but I want to say one 
word. I am not clever, I know. But the priest says, when 
one is very clever one does not see simple things so straight. 
I do not know. I want you to think. Of course you can 
judge better than I. But — do you do rightly by Bruno? 
He has been so good, and given up so much, and hoped so 
much: is it not just a little hard that you should be so long- 
ing to leave him ? Perhaps he does love you selfishly. But 
is not your want to get away selfish too ? He has been cruel. 
Oh, yes ! that is certain. But then no doubt he was in pain : 
he hardly knew what he did. If I were you, I would try and 
do what he wishes. Yes, I would. You would have had no 
life at all if it had not been for him. Is that nothing? I 
would try, if I were you.” 

Then, afraid of what she had said, and afraid of being late 
at her home, she took up her sack and her fagots, and went 
away into the rain-fog, down the rough side of the plowed land, 
over the yellow and brown leaves fallen from the vines. 

“ She does not know. She knows no more than the mules 
or the stones know,” thought Signa, while she ran on with 
firm, fast feet, and the boughs like a dark cloud over her 
head. 


SIGNA. 


241 


Genius lives in isolation, and suffers from it. But perhaps 
it creates it. 

The breath of its lips is like ether; purer than the air 
around it : it changes the air for others to ice. 

The day went on, and Bruno did not return. The peasant 
pondered and wondered, but had the soup and the wine, and 
stayed and saw to the fields and the cattle. 

Signa wandered up into the woods, and stayed there till 
nightfall. The rain had passed away, but there was no sun. 

The brow of the hill is very wild, — a great breadth of gorse 
and myrtle, with huge stones scattered over it, and thousands 
of sea-pines standing bold against the sky. Here in spring 
and summer the nightingales sing in countless numbers. 

He had so often taken his violin up there and played in 
concert with them, echoing and catching all their notes. 

It seemed to him terribly silent now. 

Palma’s words pursued him into that cool gray silence. 

She did not know : she was so stupid : and still she had 
awakened his conscience. 

Conscience and genius, — the instinct of the heart and the 
desire of the mind, — the voice that warns and the voice that 
ordains : when these are in conflict it is bitter for the life in 
which they are at war ; most bitter of all when that life is in 
its opening youth, and sure of everything and yet sure of 
nothing. 

The boy threw himself downward on the wet earth, and 
leaned his cheek on his hands, and gazed into the dim watery 
world underneath him, where all the distant towns and the 
pale villages began to gleam whitely and faintly, like little 
clouds, on the dark grayness of the plains, and the dull blue 
and black of the mountains, which rose like ramparts of iron 
in the east and north. 

The girl was stupid, — so stupid that every one knew she 
had never learned her alphabet even, — and yet he felt that 
here she had seen and had spoken aright. That he felt. 

Signa had had few moral teachings in his seventeen years 
of life. 

There is virtue on these lonely hill-sides, but it is virtue 
self-sown, wind-drifted, like the wild pomegranate-bushes, and 
the wild peach-trees. 

No one had taught him what was right or wrong, so long 
L 21 


242 


SIGNA. 


as he observed all the rules of the Church and did not blunder 
against any civil law. So far as he had been told, he had 
goodness enough to make his peace with Heaven. But the 
boy’s own mind had clearness and simplicity in it, and went 
by instinct to a higher sense of right and wrong than any he 
had been ever taught, — as Palma’s did likewise, — Palma, who 
trotted in the mud or dust all her days, and whose brain was 
all dulled with small cares as with cobwebs. 

He knew that she was right. 

That he was thankless and selfish ; that the hate which 
throbbed sullenly in him was almost a crime ; that a wolf cub, 
fed and housed and cared for as he had been, would have had 
more gratitude than he. 

He knew that she was right. 

That his life ought to be offered to the man who had done 
all for it ; that his long debt ought to cancel an hour’s wrong ; 
that since he had no other way or means of payment save 
obedience, he should obey, — even to the sacrifice of all his 
dreams, even to the crushing out of all his soul. 

He lay chest downward underneath the pines, and gazed 
into the misty depths below, and felt the hard sharp pain of 
his consciousness of right gnaw at him with her remembered 
words. He could see the line of his olive-trees and the fields 
where he was to labor all his life long, facing the sunrise. 

He was wise enough to know that he could not have both 
lives ; that as he grew to manhood he must cease to be either 
peasant or musician ; that he must renounce one thing or the 
other. He had lived too much on the soil not to know the 
ruthless toll of hours and the ceaseless patience and purpose 
which the soil, ere it will consent to repay him anything, ex- 
acts from the husbandman. 

He knew that he must choose, now and forever. 

It was the old common choice between bodily need and 
spiritual desire ; only for him the lower need was the one 
linked with duty, the higher need was the one linked with 
sin. He lay and gazed at the dark fields that were to be 
his own, and the brook that glimmered like a glow-worm 
under its dusky rushes. And it had been there that the 
violin had been broken and all its melody silenced for ever 

It froze his heart against the little spot. He hated that 
and aye ! 


SIGN A. 


243 


shallow water which could sing on and on and on, where the 
greater music had been hushed into dumbness. 

It seemed like a parable to him. 

Just as the violin had been stricken mute there, so would 
be the powers in him. Just as the silver string had stiapped, 
so would his heart break by that cruel streamlet. He saw 
himself growing older and older, living on and on, with the 
music dying in him every day and every year, a little more and 
a little more. 

He saw himself as he would be on that land that looked to 
the morning light, — spending his breath in shouting call-words 
to the panting oxen, spending his strength in sowing and in 
reaping the sum of his daily bread, touching his lute perhaps 
at evening with dull tired hands, that others might dance under 
the olive-boughs. 

What use would the morning light be to him then? What 
would it say to him ? He would only be able to look on the 
black earth he turned, as it dawned ; he would only grow to 
loathe the little song-birds, awakened by its beams, because 
they would be free and he never. He lay looking down and 
thinking and seeing himself thus — as he would be — in all the 
years to come. 

His eyes were dry, his face was calm ; the coldness that had 
frozen about him in the night, when he had watched by his 
ruined Rusignuolo, never changed. It was as if all his boy- 
hood had perished in him with that lost music. 

The struggle was hard in him. All the longing of his soul 
wrestled with the consciousness of duty which the speech of 
the girl had stung into life. He knew that he ought to forgive. 
He knew that he ought to obey. All the earth and all the air 
around him spoke to him of this man’s exceeding love. He 
looked down on the river from whose flood it had rescued him. 
He looked down on the roof under whose shelter it had har- 
bored him. He looked down on the old gray gateway beside 
whose shadow it had faced calumny and forgiven treachery for 
his sake. He looked down on the old dark trees beneath 
whose foliage it had toiled for him in endless labor from day- 
break to nightfall, in light and in darkness, through sixteen 
years. 

And he let the blow of a- moment’s passion sweep it all 
away as though it had never been. Mighty and enduring as 


244 


SIGNA. 


granite, it was to him dissolved in a second of time like an 
image of snow. 

He wrestled with himself for this. He strove against the 
hardening of his heart. He struggled to change himself ; to 
forgive ; to obey. 

It was of no use. 

With the music from the broken strings, gratitude and af- 
fection had passed out of his heart, and left a dead silence 
there, — a silence in which his conscience indeed spoke, but 
spoke in vain. 

When the Ave Maria tolled dully under the mists of the 
plain, he got up slowly, and went slowly homeward. 

His mind was made up : he would not live on in his body 
slaying his soul. 

“ He killed the Eusignuolo,” he said to himself. “ He 
would kill me.” 

And he resolved to live his own life ; how or where he 
knew nothing ; only by his own means and in his own way, 
no longer eating the bread of the man who loved him indeed, 
but who hated his genius and who wished it to perish. 

“ What one can do is sweeter and dearer than what any- 
thing is,” he thought to himself, with the terrible self-absorp- 
tion of the artist in his art, — terrible, because ever fore- 
doomed to die in agony soon or late, under some human passion 
that avenges the rejection of humanity. 

And he went slowly down the hill-side home, losing sight 
of the brook and the olives, for it had grown quite dark. 

The house was silent. The shutters were closed. The dog 
was mute. He lifted the latch of the door and entered. 

There was the glow from a lighted lamp upon the stone of 
the floor. 

In the light stood Bruno. 

^ He came forward and bowed his head before the boy. He 
said, — 

“ Forgive me.” 


STQNA. 


245 


CHAPTER XXIV. 

That night, when Signa had gone to his bed of hay, and 
had fallen asleep there, with the tears left wet upon his lashes,— 
Bruno sat still and lost in thought, with his head sunk upon 
his breast. 

The boy must go. 

That was sure. That was plain to him. 

Signa had begged to stay and do his will in all things, — 
meaning what he said. Touched into passionate repentance 
of his own hardness of heart by this noble remorse which had 
bent the strength of the man before him, he had vowed in 
uttermost sincerity of purpose to live and die on the hill-side. 
Bruno, a suppliant before him, had awed and ruled him, as 
Bruno, a master tyrant over him, never could have done. 

When he had been embittering his soul against the love 
that saved and sheltered him, that love had been returning 
to him, bringing the fierce, proud, stern soul of the man into 
supplication before him, — him, a child, a debtor, a beggar, an 
ingrate ! 

The sharpness of the contrast had stung him to the quick. 

At the first words of Bruno he had fallen on his neck in 
passionate contrition. 

His thankless, oblivious, selfish passion seemed vile to him 
as a crime. 

“ Forgive me,” said Bruno. 

But the boy knew that the forgiveness needed was for him- 
self ; that passion may be an infirmity of man, but that in- 
gratitude is a curse of hell. 

“ I will do what you wish,” he had vowed, in all the breath- 
less eagerness of his repentance. “ I shall be happy, ^ — so 
happy ! I will never go away, — never, never ! Let my foolish 
dreams die. They are not worth a moment of sorrow or re- 
gret to you. I shall be happy here, — so happy !” 

Bruno had smiled ; but it was a smile whose tenderness 
had half appalled the boy. 

“ My dear,” he had answered, “ later we will talk of that. 

21 * 


246 


SIGNA. 


I sinned enough against you ; I will try to do right — hence- 
forth.” 

And when it was midnight, and the boy slept in the little 
corner chamber with the blessed palm-sheaf above his head, 
Bruno sat still and pondered how to do this right. 

Passion had mastered him. The old brutal, swift, savage, 
unthinking rage, which had done so much evil in his day, had 
burst out like a smothered flame, and for the first time had 
smitten the living thing in which all his affections and all his 
atonement centred. When he had struck his heel down on 
the Rusignuolo, it had seemed to him as if he were crushing 
out the devil that was tempting the boy from his side into all 
the evil of the world. All his own great love and uncounted 
sacrifices had been as nothing beside a plaything of wood, a 
toy of sound and wind ! — it had seemed to him as if he gave 
a kingdom and got back a stone. 

In the fury of his pain, all that was worst in him surged up 
from its long sleep and broke its bonds. He let all the evil 
in him loose. He went down into the city and plunged into 
all the license that he had sternly shunned so long. He came 
out from the riot of it cooled and in his right mind, like a 
man who awakes from the heavy sleep of drugs. Three 
nights had gone by ; he hated himself ; he thought of the boy 
without bitterness and with longing ; he felt as if he were not 
worthy to meet the clear eyes of a child. 

He went, in the dull gray rain of the afternoon, into a little 
dark chapel in the oldest quarter of the city, and kneeled 
down in the black shadow of it and confessed his sins. It 
was his duty, he thought ; he had been reared so. He be- 
lieved that he purified his soul. 

He was vile in his own sight. 

In his remorse, the broken Rusignuolo seemed to him — 
no less than it had seemed to Signa, mourning it on the hill- 
side — a human thing, with a voice from heaven in it, that he 
had hurled into death and silenced by a deed as cruel as 
Cain’s. 

He went homeward along the familiar road, with the Ave- 
Maria bells ringing through the fog. As he went, he struggled 
hard with himself. He hated this madness, as it seemed to 
him, which had taken possession of the boy. He hated it at 
once with the jealousy of an afiection which beheld in it an 


SIGNA. 


247 


irresistible rival, and with the superstitious fear which an un- 
educated intelligence has of an incomprehensible mental 
power. 

^ Bruno was of the same stuff as those men who in earlier 
ages burned the magic out of creatures whom they believed be- 
witched, and thought the ruthless torture that they dealt a 
righteous service both to God and man. In his sight, it was 
a sorcery which enthralled Signa and made him blind to all 
the peace and safety and plenty and sweetness of the life upon 
the hills. 

But, with the bating of his fury, the calmness of reason 
had returned to him. It was a sorcery, — that he thought ; 
but it was one which there was no combating, — that he saw 
also. He saw that it would only be possible to stifle it, by 
destroying the very core of the boy’s life. 

He might keep his hand on the throat of his nightingale, 
— true ; but, under the pressure, the life would go out with 
the song. 

Though to him this strange absorbing instinct which killed 
all other was beyond any possible comprehension, Bruno, by 
the force of his love for the lad, knew that he must let him 
go, or see him fade away into a hopeless and joyless creature, 
forever beating and thirsting to be free. 

As he went along the road in the rain which he never felt, 
under the sound of the bells which he never heard, he thought, 
and thought, and thought, — tearing the selfishness out of his 
heart with the same haste and rage as in other years he had 
hurled oaths or stricken steel at those who had ofended him. 

To do right by the boy. 

That had been his first intent, his sole desire, since, driving 
his cattle out on the day after the flood, he had made his mute 
promise to dead Pippa. 

But what was right ? 

He did not know. His reason as a man told him that, the 
strong instincts of the brain being stifled, the boy would fall 
into a feeble, worthless, and unhappy thing. His ignorance 
as a peasant made him fear, with all a peasant’s dread of the 
unknown and the unseen, the world into which Signa pined 
to soar away, and the art which usurped all his desires. 

Music ! — well, what was it ? Just a thing that came to 
eveiy flute-voiced girl carrying her linen to the river’s brink. 


248 


SIONA. 


every lithe-fingered shepherd /or ox-driver who, when his 
work was done, thrummed on a mandolin before the cottage 
door. 

This power which took empire over the boy, and drove him 
from all paths of custom and of duty, and made him happy 
with a few signs upon a piece of paper, — that was beyond all 
sense and meaning to him, — a horrible exaggeration and dis- 
tortion of an innocent thing, such as men sent who had the 
evil eye. 

How to do right ? 

To burn and stamp this madness out of the young soul? — 
or to let it have its way and trust to heaven ? 

If he only knew. 

In the Lastra the lamps were burning. There was a funeral 
going through the gates ; the bier borne by the brothers of the 
Misericordia. 

Unconsciously, from habit, he stood still and crossed him- 
self, and uncovered his head. When it had passed, a thought 
had come to him. 

He entered the church, where Luigi Dini was putting out the 
lights after benediction. Bruno went up to him without 
greeting. 

“ Old Maso told the lad men by music have been greater 
than kings. Is that a lie ?” 

The sacristan was used to him, and took no ofiense. 

“ It is a truth,” he answered. 

“ Can the lad be great ?” 

“ I think so.” 

“ But is that happiness ?” 

“ No.” 

“ What is the use of it, then ?” 

“ It is what is not happy that speaks to men of Grod. 
Happy men think of their coffers, — of their children, — of 
their bodies, — of their appetites: they are content with all 
that.” 

“ You have known a great man ?” 

“ Never out of books.” 

“ And happy men ?” 

“ Yes ; they were three parts fool, and the rest rogue.” 

Bruno was silent : he wanted to be as God to the lad. He 
wanted to give him endless daylight and ceaseless peace. He 


SIGN A. 


249 


wanted to be his fate, and stand always between him and pain 
and sorrow and accident and the calamities of earth. 

The old man looked up at him, and understood his thought. 

“ You cannot do it,” he said, answering what was not 
spoken. “ It is not given to any life to be the providence of 
another.” 

The veins swelled on Bruno’s forehead : a heavy sigh broke 
from him : he was never a man to let another know the thing 
he felt, but now pain mastered him, — the miserable pain of 
irresolution and uncertainty, and of that sense, beyond all 
others oppressive, of combating in the dark an unseen and un- 
measured force. 

He stretched his hands out with an unconscious gesture, as 
of a blind man seeking guidance. 

“ Look : 3 ’'ou know the boy as well as I ; better, may-be. 
For his soul is dark to me. He is higher than I. It is as 
when a bird goes up — up — against the sun. You cannot fol- 
low it. There is too much light where it is gone. I only 
want to do the best. For me it does not matter. You see, 
I have got the bit of land for him, — the land on the moun- 
tain ; I have made it good land and rich, and it is a safe pro- 
vision for him all his days. But, then, when he breaks his 
heart at thoughts of it, and is crazed to learn, and talks of 
being great, — if only I could tell what to do ! Perhaps it is 
a boy’s whim, and to do right one should be hard with him 
and rough, and stamp it out, and seem cruel now, and he 
would be thankful in a few gears’ time ? And then, again, 
if one made a mistake, — if one did the wrong thing, — if he 
sighed and fretted, and wanted what he had not, and were 
never content, and fell away to feebleness and uselessness, — 
how would one forgive oneself — ever ? How can I tell ? I do 
not understand. Ij^ at seventeen, they had said to me, ‘ There 
is a bit of good land all for you, all your own, and you be- 
holden to no man, and working all for yourself, and sharing with 
no master,’ I should have been mad with joy and pride. I 
should have seen nothing but my corn and my grapes. I 
should have thought I was better off than any one else in the 
wide world. Why should it not be so with him ? I do not 
understand. He is Pippa’s boy. He has our blood in him. 
He should love the soil. He did not get his dream from 
Pippa. If one only knew. For me it does not matter. 1 

L* 


250 SJONA. 

\ 

will cut off my right hand if that will serve him, if that will 
keep his soul safe here and hereafter. But what he wants 
seems madness. Is it a devil that lures him ? Or is it an 
angel calls? How can one know? I want to do the thing 
that best will serve him. But how to find it ? Tell me, if 
you know. Do not think of me. For me it does not matter.” 

He ceased, and leaned his hand on the rail before the dark 
altar, on which the last light had just sunk out. The rail 
shook with the trembling of his strong nerves; his head 
dropped upon his chest. 

The old man looked at him a moment. 

“You will be lonely if he go: it is not fair to you: you 
have done all for him all his life.” 

Bruno gave an impatient gesture. 

“ I say, for me it does not matter. I can live alone. An- 
swer for the boy, — as if I were dead, and there were only him 
to think of, — for his good.” 

“ Then I say. Let him go.” 

Bruno was silent. He breathed hard. 

“ Let him go,” repeated the sacristan. “ I never knew a 
great man. No. My path did not lie that way. But I did 
know one, a man that might have been great, — truly great, 
I think. It was when I was a lad. He was a little older 
than I was. He traveled with the first little troop that I 
belonged to then, — singers, and actors, and musicians, all of 
us going from town to town as the fairs, and the feasts, and 
the carnival, and the vintage, fell. You have heard me talk 
of it. He was the son of a poor organist, and was himself a 
violin-player, hardly more than a boy, just keeping body and 
soul together; he played divinely, and he wrote beautiful 
things, just as your boy does now. People would weep to 
hear him. It was like nothing mortal. He had an old 
mother, widowed, and a little sister in Perugia. They lived 
wretchedly. He sent them every coin that he could get. He 
stinted himself. One night while he was playing he fainted. 
It was only hunger. Hunger is so common. The world is so 
full. He used to dream of greatness, just as your lad does. 
And indeed the things he made were perfect. Only he had so 
little time, and never had any chance to get them heard. One 
day he had a letter from his mother. His grandfather, a hard 
man, who had denounced her for her marriage, had relented, 


SIGN A. 


251 


and had oflFered to take home Claudio into his house and way 
of business, on condition that he should touch no note of music 
ever again. The old man was a money-changer and banker in 
the north, sharp and keen, and hard as any stone. The mother 
and the little sister implored him ; they starved for all that he 
could do ; and here were peace and plenty, only waiting for 
his will. They wrote and wrote and wrote ; then at last they 
came. They wept, and raved, and entreated, and reproached. 
They wore him out; he yielded. ‘ It will kill me,’ said Claudio. 

‘ But if it must be — for them ’ That night he burned all 

he had ever written. It was to him worse than any murder. 
He believed he killed his soul. He suffered hideously. Death 
seemed to pass over him as the flame took his music. ‘ No 
one will ever have it now,’ he said. And he smiled. I sup- 
pose they smile like that in hell, thinking of what they have 
to see, and of the heaven they will never see. He went. The 
mother and the little sister were happy. They had enough, 
and more than enough. ‘ Claudio will be a rich man,’ they 
said to me. They rejoiced in their success. They thought 
they had done rightly for him as well as happily for them- 
selves. When a year and a little more had gone by, I got a 
message begging me to go to Claudio in Trieste. I was with a 
theatre in Verona at the time. I did not know how to do it; 
but I felt that I should never see his face again unless I 
hastened. I crossed the sea. I found him dying. ‘ I did my 
best,’ he said to me. ‘ Indeed I did my best. But I died 
when they killed the music in me. My body has dragged on 
a little longer, but I died then.’ Then he asked them to let 
me sing to him ; he had kept his vow ; he had not played or 
heard one note. The mother and the sister were there, weep- 
ing. The old man said, ‘Yes: he may have what he" will 
now.’ I sang to him, — as men have sung masses burning at 
the stake. For I loved Claudio. The dying life flamed up in 
him as he heard. It came back for one moment into his veins, 
into his eyes, into his soul. He raised himself with such a 
look upon his face, — ah, such a look ! if there be angels indeed 
they must look so ! — and he lifted his voice, and sang, with all 
the strength and beauty of his youth returned to him, the 
Eterno Genitor, the chant that Metastasio died singing. One 
moment — but a moment, so it seemed — the glory of the song 
brought his life back. Then his voice dropped, — all suddenly. 


252 


SIGN A. 


His mother raised him. He was dead. The old man cried 
to Heaven to take his gold and give him back the boy. But 
Heaven does not hear these prayers, or will not answer them. 
They told me later he had labored at the desk with patience, 
and with constant effort ; but it had killed him. When the 
old man had relented, and would have made him free in his 
own way, it was too late. If you blind a bird you cannot give 
sight and liberty again ; nay, if you beseech Grod ever so, even 
He cannot do it. There are things that, done, cannot be un- 
done, by God or by man. His mother lived out her days a 
rich woman. His sister had a large inheritance, and wedded 
wealthily. But it had been bought with Claudio’s life, and 
who shall say what the world did not lose ? That is true. 
He was my friend. It was fifty years ago, — all that. Claudio 
would be old. But the look that was in Claudio’s eyes is in 
your boy’s. And I think — I think — if you keep him here, 
and deaden his soul in him, that his fate will be the same.” 

Bruno made no answer. 

He stood still, with his head bent by the side-altar, in the 
gloom of the church that was only lighted by the brazen 
sconce that the old man carried in his hand. He had not lost 
one word ; his breath came slowly and loud ; he did not under- 
stand : he did not know what it was that this dead lad and this 
living one loved beyond ease, and safety, and friends, and 
peace, and daily bread. He did not understand one whit the 
more. But he saw what he must do. 

He turned with a heavy sigh, like a man who stoops to take 
up a great burden on his shoulders and walk on with it. 

“Good-night!” he said, simply, and he went through the 
little dark church, lost in thought, and out into the starless, 
misty night. 

Luigi Dini went up the wooden stairs into the room where 
the brethren keep their robes and masks. 

“ He will let the boy go,” he said to himself. 

The bell had rung for succor for a peasant who had been 
flung from a mule-cart on the road going to Santa Maria ; some 
brethren were busily fastening their cloaks, while others got 
out the black stretcher to go and fetch the wounded man. 
Among them was Lippo, ever foremost in good works. 

As Lippo drew the hood over his head, he was telling his 
neighbor how his brother Bruno had lent money out for several 


SIGNA. 


253 


years on hypothec to the poor wretch Baccio Alessi, the gilder, 
in the city, on the fine little piece of land under Artemino, 
that ran with what he farmed ; and of how poor Baccio, being 
close driven by unlooked-for calamity and the cruelty of credit- 
ors who had no mercy on a hard-working creature, had been 
in direst need, and Bruno, seeing good his time, and taking 
advantage of necessity, had foreclosed and drawn his claim so 
tightly and so suddenly that Baccio Alessi had uo chance or 
claim, and so the land had passed to Bruno, — who, as he once had 
wasted all his substance on evil-living and light women, now 
would make soup out of pebbles and milk a milk-stone for the 
sake of his ill-begotten darling whom he had foisted on the 
memory of poor Pippa. 

“He will let the boy go,” thought the old man, while Lippo, 
mourning over his brother’s hardness of greed and the poverty 
of poor Baccio in the city, drew his cowl close and hurried 
away to help raise the half-dead peasant, and Bruno, solitary 
and musing, went up into the darkness and silence of the 
hills. 

“ The boy must go,” thought Bruno, as he flung his cloak 
across his mouth against the watery cold, and ascended the 
sea-road in the teeth of the wind from the northward. 

The outer world was a black and empty space to him. The 
cities were whirlpools of vice, into which the young were 
caught as in nets. The only life that he could comprehend, 
or could believe to be of any worth, was the life of the hus- 
bandman living and dying under one roof. In the dreams that 
made the future beautiful to the lad he himself had no belief. 
In the greatness that the lad aspired to he saw no reality and 
no excellence ; but only a vague dark chimera of folly that 
would lead down, down, down, into a bottomless abyss. 

He had no consolation of hope. 

He had no fond simple belief in some impending though 
unknown good, such as mothers who love their sbns without 
comprehending them are solaced by when their children leave 
them. 

To him all beyond was rayless, meaningless, comfortless. 

He had said truly : he did not understand. 

He only knew that the boy would perish here like the dead 
Claudio, and so he must go. 

The rest was with the future, the silent, dark, inexorable 
22 


254 


SIGNA. 


future, which he burned to tear asunder as Milo tore the oak, 
and see the heart of it and thfe secret, no matter what they 
were. 

All he did know was that he himself was nothing in the life 
that owed him all. 

He sat motionless while the night waned ; not sleeping ; 
wide awake, but half paralyzed, as a man under gunshot pain. 

The boy must go, — go to forget the sweet hill-side, the hand 
that gave him daily bread, the old straight wholesome ways, 
the old clean simple paths, the old innocent natural affections; 
go to forget them all ; go to get drunk on this strange mad- 
ness of unrest; go to be possessed of this fever of desired 
greatness. 

Bruno cheated himself with no false faiths. 

If the boy went now, he went forever. 

His steps indeed might return, but the heart and the youth 
and the love of him never. If he went to the world and to 
fame and to art, these would hold him forever. Bruno knew 
none of the three, but this he felt. No baseless hopes, no 
lingering blindness, duped him. 

Nevertheless he knew that he must go. 

Go, whilst he himself stayed to labor for him, and get out 
of the soil the means for him to pursue the things he wished, 
and change his visions into reality if such things ever were 
done in the world, and keep here roof and house and refuge 
for him, if so be that he should never find his dreams come 
true, but should return sickened and bruised with efibrt and 
with failure. 

The boy must go ; this was his own portion, — to labor here, 
and get the gold together that would give this young thing 
wings. 

He did not think of that with any regret. 

It was to him natural. He had of late years so bent all his 
energies and all his endurance into working for the good of the 
boy, that to continue doing this was nothing that seemed to 
him either generous or strange. It was what he had always 
said to himself that he would do for Pippa’s son. 

Bruno went home to his hills. 

The morrow would be All Souls’ Day. 

It was late in the afternoon. He went out of his way to 
the little church of his daily worship. 


SIGN A. 


255 


Vespers were just over. The old priest was in his sacristy 
Two or three peasants were coming out. The little, dark 
church was being hung with veils of black, here and there, by 
the sacristan ; and a woman, who wept as she worked, was 
putting up some branches of everl^ting-flowers, — her lover 
had died in the harvest-time. 

Bruno went into the sacristy, and laid some money down on 
the table. 

“ For Pippa’s soul — to-morrow!” 

The old priest gave him his blessing; he dwelt on the same 
hill-side, and believed in the story of Pippa. 

Bruno went out into the twilight. 

“ She will know I keep faith with her,” he said to himself, 
and then entered his dwelling-house, and stood before Pippa’s 
son, and said, “ Forgive me 1” 

When many hours had gone by, and the boy was at rest, 
Bruno sat on, with his solitary lamp burning. 

“ The boy must go,” he thought still, sitting alone when 
midnight was past, and Signa slept. 

He was at peace with himself ; at least, he had that deep, 
sad peace — sad as death — which follows the surrender, for 
another’s sake, of all the hope of life. 

The calm of a great repentance, and of an unflinching self- 
sacrifice, was with him, the cold funeral meats wherewith Duty 
feeds her faithful. 

But a great loneliness weighed on him, and closed round 
him. He felt that he had given a kingdom and got back a 
stone. 

Like all generous natures, he had poured out his gift un- 
thinking, ungrudging, and without measure. 

His hands were empty, and his heart was desolate. 

That was his reward. 

It is a common one. 

The night wore on ; the intense chilliness of coming dawn 
came into the house like ice ; the cock crowed from the stable. 
He rose and went into the inner chamber, where the boy was; 
it was only parted by an archway from the common room. 

Signa lay asleep, his head upon his arm, his face turned 
upward. Bruno lowered the lamp, shading it with one hand, 
so as not to awaken him. Its light fell on his soft young 
limbs, on his thick lashes, on his beautiful mouth. Bruno 


256 SIGN A. 

I 

looked at him long. Then two great tears gathered in his own 
eyes, and fell down his cheeks slowly, like the great rain-drops 
that follow storm. 

He stood silent for a while ; the lad slept on, unconscious ; 
then he set down the lamp, and blew the flame of it out, and, 
without noise, unbarred his house-door and went into the open 
air and began his labor for the day. 

There was a strong wind blowing from the north. Rain 
was falling. It was dawn, — but dawn without the sun. 

He yoked his oxen ; and alone and in the darkness he began 
the day. 


CHAPTER XXV. 

When winter came, Bruno dwelt alone in the old house on 
the hills, and Signa studied music in the schools of Bologna. 

In the fair bright weather of the spring, when the virgin 
gold of the dafibdils was scattered broadcast everywhere, an old 
man with white hair and horn spectacles hobbled over the 
stones by the south gate to the post for a letter, and got it, 
and went and read it in the shade by the shrine of our Lady 
of Good Counsel, and then took his way through the Lastra 
to go across the bridge towards the great hills. 

As he went under the west gateway, an old woman put her 
head out over a window-board that had roses on and some 
hyacinths not yet in bloom. 

“ Is he well ?” she cried down into the street. 

“ Quite well,” said the old man, looking up, and went on 
between the budding trees. 

Before he reached the bridge, a girl raced down the sloping 
fields, all green with corn. She had great knots of scarlet 
wild-flowers and white snow-flakes, that she was tying up for 
market, in her hands. Her feet were wet, because she had 
been standing in the brook to get the flowers ; she had a 
pitcher slung at her back ; her heart beat so high and her 
breath came so fast that the lacing of her ragged bodice broke. 

“ Is he coming back?” she asked, and her great black eyes 
shone like stars. 


SIGNA. 


257 


“ Coming back ! — no !” said the old man, with a smile. “ He 
must never come back now, Palma. That would never do.” 

The girl turned, and went away up the fields slowly, letting 
the snowflakes drop. 

The old man went on up the sea-road 

There was the lovely afternoon light everywhere ; all the 
soil was radiant with leaf and blade ; the river was a sheet of 
gold and green, shining like the lizards ; the air was so clear 
that on the highest and farthest heights the smallest dwelling 
gleamed white as any pearl, and each tree told ; near at hand, 
along the footpaths, every tuft of grass had the rich ruby and 
purple of the anemone in it, and the fresh odors of the violet; 
while the daffodils were tossing everywhere above the short 
green wheat. But the sacristan looked at none of these 
things. 

lie was old. 

An hour and more’s sturdy labored walking brought him 
midway on the great hill, with the stone pines on its summit, 
and the blue mountain in its rear. A west wind was blowing 
sweetness from the fir woods and salt from the sea. A man 
was at work in the bean-fields that ran under the olives. 

He straightened his back and looked up, shading his eyes 
from the sun. Then he saw the open letter, and made an 
eager stride forward. 

“ Is he happy ?” he asked.' 

“ This is the love that loves best,” thought Luigi Dini. And 
he sat down in the shade. 

“Is he happy?” he asked, resting his hand on his hip, 
under the olive-boughs, in the March afternoon. 

And the old man answered him truthfully from the letter 
that was a sealed book to Bruno, “ Yes — he is happy and 
read him what the boy said. 

Bruno looked at the piece of paper with longing eyes. He 
wished that in his own boyhood he had learned to read, in- 
stead of wading among the canes, and climbing for nests of 
birds, and scaling con vent- walls to get the grapes, and romp- 
ing and dancing with every girl he could whenever a mandolin 
was playing. 

Signa wrote the truth ; he was happy. 

He had a little room under the roof. He heard the clang- 
ing of the coppersmith’s hammers all day long. He missed 

22 * 


258 


SIONA. 


the freedom of the hills, as all hill-born creatures shut in cities 
do. The fare he had' was meagre and untempting. To the 
people whom he was with he was a little peasant, a little stu- 
dent, — nothing more ; they were too busy to heed him further. 

The town was very dark, very chill, very oppressive ; with 
the furious Alpine winds driving through it, and the high 
arcades shutting in the blackness of the shadows, and the bit- 
terness of the cold, it was like a vast tomb, after the radiance 
of the sunset and the sunrise from the mountains beyond the 
Lastra. 

Physically he suffered much in his new life. Like Rossini, 
he had to study his score in his bed, to keep his hands from 
being numbed to ice. When he went out in the gloom of the 
streets, it seemed to him as if noon were night. He fainted 
twice from hunger and the stifling sense of want of air in the 
class-room of the academy. He did not know how to breathe, 
being shut forever within four walls, — he who had been used 
to dwell on the high hills with the sheep and wander through 
the thyme and the gorse like the kids. 

Other lads mocked him for a thousand things, — for his 
girlish beauty ; for his gentle ways ; for his coarse-spun shirts ; 
for his horror of hurting any creature ; for his innocence of 
mind ; for his long thick curls ; for his hatred of shoes, which 
he would fling off the moment that he wanted to run fast ; 
for a thousand things that made him at once so wise and so 
foolish, so childlike and so thoughtful ; while they were town- 
bred world-worn young scholars, who knew everything and 
meditated upon nothing. 

He suffered much in many ways. 

Yet he wrote no lie when he told them that he was happy. 
He was happy, though always lonely, and sometimes fright- 
ened, and very often persecuted. He was happy, looking up- 
ward at the face of the St. Cecilia. Happy, learning all that the 
great professors of his chosen art would teach him. Happy, 
in his own little attic, that he would fly to for refuge, as a 
bird to its nest, studying with all the powers of his mind the 
themes that had been given him to comprehend or to com- 
pose ; happiest of all, when they ordered him a sonnet of 
Metastasio, or an ode of Giusti, to be set to music in a dozen 
different ways, and he could let all his subtlest con»binations 
and wildest fancies have full play, and, sitting in the little 


SIGNA. 


259 


dark garret, heard again the “ beautiful things” that he had 
used to hear on his own mounttiins, till it seemed to him that 
the Kusignuolo was with him once more. 

“ I am as happy as ever I can be,” he wrote, not thinking 
hew cruel the words might sound ; and wrote the truth. 

For cold and hardship did not hurt him much or seem great 
things to bear after his training in the house of Lippo. And 
mockery wounded him little, because he heard so little what 
they said, being always dreaming ; and those in authority over 
him praised him for his docile ways, and found his talent 
great ; and many women were kind to him for the sake of his 
fair face with its beautiful amorous-lidded eyes that never yet 
had found a woman beautiful ; and he believed in his own 
future. 

Who can do this is happy. 

When life is still a coin unspent, it looks of purest gold, 
and bears on it, under a bough of laurel, the figures of Victory 
and of Love. But when it is paid away and gone forever, 
its poor change left from it is of base metal. Even if other 
men still see stamped on its alloy the Victory or the Love 
within the garland, we who hold the poor coin in our own 
hands know that the figures struck on it are those of Failure 
and of Falsehood, and that the laurel-wreath was copied from 
a faded knot of fennel. 

Signa, whose coin was still unspent, wrote truly, “ I am 
happy.” 

Meanwhile another suffered greatly to give him happiness. 

Bruno, a poor man as the world measures such things, had 
always been a rich one in his own esteem. The Lady Poverty 
of St. Francis had been a mistress with whom he had never 
quarreled. 

True, he had to labor in all hours and all weathers ; he had 
to be content with rough bread and onion-soup most of his 
days ; he*had to be abroad in the driving hail-storm as in the 
scorching sirocco. 

But all things are measured by habit and weighed by com- 
parison. Beside such a man as Sandro Zanobetti or the poorer 
peasants on his own hill-side, Bruno was almost wealthy, having 
no need to stint himself for wood or oil or wine, having those 
fine cattle of his own, and having, whenever he had cause to 
go down into the city, loose money in his pocket, more or less, 


260 


SIGNA. 


for drinking with a friend or idling with a woman. He had 
never thought of himself as a poor man since becoming, at 
his parents’ and his brothers’ death, the only owner of the old 
house he and his forefathers had been born in ; to have a roof 
over you and food enough, and to be debtor to no man for any- 
thing, — that seemed to him wealth. 

Perhaps the world was happier when the bulk of its people 
thought so also. 

But now, for the first time in all his life, the check and gall 
of poverty pressed on him ; the chain which rivete to the soil 
those who gain their bread from it was for the first time heavy 
about his feet. 

He had to send the boy from him ; he had to let him go 
and live alone ; he had to trust blindly that all was well. He 
could not stir. He could not go and see for himself He 
could not move and dwell wherever the thing he loved might 
drift. He had to stay there, and turn the same sods and prune 
the same trees day after day, month after month, year after 
year. 

For the first time he realized the one supreme good of 
money, — that it gives wings to men. 

When the heart of a man or woman is where the feet are, 
wings are not needed ; but when the heart goes longingly far 
away, and the feet must still abide on the same spot, then the 
simplest and hardiest yearns for fiight. 

Gold is as the pinion of Hermes. 

Bruno, who knew nothing of Hermes, but saw the winged 
figure painted in a thousand places and modeled in a thousand 
ways in the friezes of old villas and the streets of old towns, 
longed for such plumes to his ankles, that he might bridge 
space and see the boy. But freedom and travel were as im- 
possible to him as those feathered sandals. He had to stay 
treading his fields from dawn to nightfall. For the first time, 
as he followed his oxen he felt as if the clinging sods were 
weights of leaden fetters. 

Still he worked more than ever. 

As it was, he could scarcely make ends meet. It was a very 
diflerent thing to keep the boy where food and drink, light 
and fuel, all came OS’ the soil, costing nothing ; and to keep 
him far off* in a city, where every crumb called for a coin. 

Luigi Dini, indeed, whom he had sent with him, had put 


SIGN A. 


261 


the lad with people that he knew, — good, honest, simple-living 
souls, who gave him a room under their roof for little in the 
grand square where the Guardaniorta of Dante is, and where 
the coppersmiths and market-folks wrangle and tussle all day 

long- 

But to maintain him thus, and meet the cost of his studies 
too, drained dry the leathern sack in which Bruno, when his 
accounts were squared with his master, put his surplus. All 
that came from the bit of land which had been Alessi’s he 
counted as the boy’s and put aside for him entire, and sent to 
him as it was wanted. But that was not suiSicient ; and to 
obtain all that was needed Bruno had to stint himself down 
to the leanest portion that a man can live on even in this land 
of his, where hard hand-labor is often cheerfully wrought from 
daybreak to evensong on a piece of blackened week-old bread. 

His beasts he would not stint, not even for Signa. His 
oxen were to him fond fellow-laborers and friends. But him- 
self he denied all except the sheer necessities of life ; and the 
gray came into his dark hair, and his strong, slender, erect 
frame grew leaner still, and he never went down into the city 
save early in the forenoon of a market-morning, lest tempta- 
tion should assail him and he should spend a coin on his own 
appetites or wishes. His life was going away from him with 
no sweetness in it and no love and no pleasure. But he did 
not think of that. It did not matter. 

Two years went by, — swiftly to the boy, leaping from height 
to height of his great art, and feeling nothing of poverty or 
privation, because always living in impersonal desires, and 
always dreaming of the future time, and always hearing the 
music of the spheres above all the bray of voices and the 
clang of metal and the tumult of footsteps in the streets around 
him. 

But very slowly to Bruno. 

To rise in the dark, to toil all day, to lie down for the heavy 
dreamless sleep of bodily fatigue, to wrestle with storm and 
drought and blight and hurricane, to chaffer for small gains, 
to follow the oxen up and down and to and fro, to go tired 
into an empty house and eat an unshared loaf and go to a joyless 
bed, — this was his portion. 

There was nothing in it to give wings to time. 

One day succeeded another without change, and the tale of 


262 


SIGNA. 


one month was as the tale of another. It was the life of a 
beast of burden, — nothing more. He had always thought no 
life could be better ; but it was oppressive to him now. 

Other men labored for their children, or had that dusky 
settle by the wood-embers made bright by some fresh-faced 
new-wedded maiden. But he was all alone, — alone with the 
thought of dead Dina on the mountain-height and Pippa’s 
body drifted to the sea. 

Men would have little to say to him : they were Lippo’s 
friends. 

He lived in almost absolute solitude. Sometimes it grew 
dreary, and the weeks seemed long. 

Two years went by, — slowly. 

Signa did not come home. The travel to and fro took too 
much money, and he was engrossed in his studies, and it was 
best so : so Luigi Dini said, and Bruno let it be. The boy did 
not ask to return. His letters were very brief, and not very 
coherent, and he forget to send messages to old Teresina or to 
Palma. But there was no fear for him. 

The sacristan’s friends under whose roof he was wrote once 
in a quarter, and spoke well of him always, and said that the 
professors did the same, and that a gentler lad or one more 
wedded to his work they never knew. And so Bruno kept his 
soul in patience, and said, “ Do not trouble him ; when he 
wishes he will come, — or if he want anything. Let him be.” 

To those who have traversed far seas and many lands, and 
who can bridge untraveled countries by the aid of experience and 
of understanding, such partings have pain, but a pain lessened 
by the certain knowledge of their span and purpose. By the 
light of remembrance or of imagination they can follow that 
which leaves them. 

But Bruno had no such solace. 

To him all that was indefinite was evil, all that was unfa- 
miliar was horrible. It is the error of ignorance at all times. 

To him the world was like the dark fathomless waste of 
waters shelving away to nameless shapeless perils such as old 
Greek mariners drew upon their charts as compassing the 
shores they knew. 

He had no light of knowledge by which to pursue in hope 
or fancy the younger life that would be launched into the 
untried realms. To him such separation was as death. 


SIONA. 


263 


He could not write ; he could not even read what was 
written. He could only trust to others that all was well with 
the boy. 

He could have none of that mental solace which supports 
the scholar ; none of that sense of natural loveliness which 
consoles the poet ; his mind could not travel beyond the nar- 
row circlet of its own pain ; his eyes could not see beauty 
everywhere, from the green fly at his foot to the sapphire 
mountains above his head ; he only noticed the sunset to tell 
the weather ; he only looked across the plain to see if the rain- 
fall would cross the river. When the autumn crocus sank 
under his share, to him it was only a weed best withered ; in 
hell he believed, and for heaven he hoped, but only dully, as 
things certain that the priests knew ; but all consolations of 
the mind or the fancy were denied to him. Superstitions, 
indeed, he had, but these were all, — sad-colored fungi in the 
stead of flowers. 

The Italian has not strong imagination. 

His grace is an instinct ; his love is a frenzy ; his gayety is 
rather joy than jest ; his melancholy is from temperament, not 
meditation ; nature is little to him ; and his religion and his 
passions alike must have physical indulgence and perpetual 
nearness, or they are nothing. 

Bruno, who had strong passions and bland faiths, but who 
had no knowledge and no insight, was solitary as only a man 
utterly ignorant can be solitary. But he never complained 
even in his own thoughts ; and he never attempted to seek 
any solace. He had set himself on absolute self-sacrifice, and 
he went through with it, as thousands and tens of thousands 
of his own countrymen have done before him in the old days, 
from Chrysostom to Francis, in the monasteries that rise ma- 
jestic amidst the brown wastes of the sun-burned plains and 
crown the emerald radiance of the hill-throned vines. 

He was in his fields all day, having a crust of bread in his 
pocket, and a flask of his own wine under the hedge. He went 
in-doors only when it was quite dark, and was at work again 
before any gleam of sun showed over the Umbrian moun- 
tains. Nothing broke the monotonous measure of his time. 
Nothing relieved the constant strain of toil. He thought that 
he grew old. But it was only that his weeks and months had 
the dullness and the barrenness of age. 


264 


SIGNA. 


Climbing tbe steep vine-lands, reaping in the sun, driving 
his oxen, working among the bare boughs in the teeth of the 
north wind, he thought always of Signa, far away there in the 
unknown city among the unfamiliar people. 

Did Signa think of him ? 

He wished he could know. 

The boy’s letters were few ; but then that was because their 
postage cost money, and every centime was of value. Luigi 
Dini read them. They had always messages, tender, thankful, 
affectionate. 

But that was not much. 

Bruno knew that the boy’s soul and heart and fancy had 
long left him, and soared into a world that he himself could no 
more reach than he could reach the star Sirius shining over 
the reaped fields in the hot night. He doubted if remem- 
brance had much hold on this child, who when with him and 
beside him had always been dreaming of the future. He did 
not reas5n about it. Only he said to himself, — 

“ It is as if he were dead.” 

But as, had the boy been dead, he would have spent all that 
he possessed on masses and prayers to ransom his soul and pur- 
chase heaven for him, as he would have fancied that he could 
do, so he toiled now, and with as little thought of recompense 
or remembrance. 

“ It is as if he were dead,” he said. 

“ Nay, nay,” the old man would urge to him. “ He only 
lives a stronger life, that is all, on his own wings, as full-fledged 
birds do. The world will hear of him. He will be fortunate, 
I think. He will do something great. He has true genius. 
Then he will come to you and say, ‘ I should have been a little 
hungry homeless goat-herd all my years had it not been for you. 
All that I am, and all that I do, and all that men praise in me, 
I owe to you.’ That is how he will come back one day.” 

But Bruno shook his head, and worked on among his vines 
and wheat, not lifting his eyes up from the soil. 

“ What will be will be,” he said, curtly. 

But he did not deceive himself, nor did he even desire to be 
much remembered. 

Bemembrance of him would mean for the lad failure. 


SIGNA. 


265 


CHAPTER XXVI. 

Meanwhile Lippo, munching tomatoes stewed with garlic, 
in the warm weather with his casement open to the evening 
air, said to his wife, — 

“ Nita, I met a man in the city to-day, who has come over 
from Bologna upon business. He told me that old Dini’s 
boast is not untrue, — that the boy of Bruno’s is doing well at 
the Music School, and that people say he is clever, and he gains 
quattrini singing in the churches, — only Bruno does not know 
that. The man knew, because his own son is at the great School, 
having a bass voice that they think to make something of 
in a year or two. It is a good thing that we never stinted the 
lad, and that all the Lastra said how good we were to him, and 
always let him go to mass, and never a clean shirt for Toto but 
there was one for him too. If ever the lad should do anything 
that the world talks about (not that I think it likely, an idle, 
dreaming brat), still, if ever it do come to pass, people will 
know we have fair claim on him, and nobody could say if he 
neglect us that it would be other than rank thanklessness. 
Not that what we did we did for gain. No, never ! But 
they do say those singing men and women make rare fortunes. 
Or if he writes for the theatres and the churches, — there is 
the man of Pesaro that wrote the ‘ Grazza Ladra’ and the 
‘ Otello,’ — I have heard them scores of times down in the city; 
he lives still, or did quite lately; and such a fuss with him as 
kings and queens and other countries make, — if it should be 
ever so with this dainty boy of Bruno’s — well, we did our duty 
by him, wife. That we can say honestly.” 

“ Ay, that we did !” said Nita, with a grin on her wide, 
angry mouth, scarlet as the tomato that she ate. 

Nita was a rough woman, and a masterful, and could lie, 
when need arose, with all the stubborness and inventiveness 
that could be desired from any daughter of Eve. But she 
could not take the daily pleasure that her lord did in keeping 
up the lie all the day long in her own household, when all 
need was over, and not a creature there to be the dupe of it. 

M 23 


266 


SIGNA. 


“We did our duty by him, and very few there would have 
been who would have taken pity on Bruno’s base-born, and 
brought him to a sense of what he owed to it,” said Lippo, 
pushing his emptied plate away with a sigh. 

He had talked himself very nearly into the belief that the 
boy was Bruno’s, and his own charity just what he had told 
the neighbors. He had said it so often that he had nearly 
grown into the belief that it was true. 

“ I was thinking,” he said, timidly, — for he was always 
timid before Nita, since who could say how she might per- 
suade Baldo to leave his money? — “ I was thinking — after all, 
he is our blood, though not come rightly by it — what do you^ 
say if we were to send him a little basket of figs and the like 
when this man goes back to Bologna? It would be just a 
little remembrance, and show one bore no rancor against him 
for that fit of passion when he blinded you.” 

“ Wait till he has written his opera,” s:iid Nita, with her 
mouth still in angry laughter. “ You are a shrewd fellow, 
Lippo. But sometimes you are over-fond of counting your 
chickens before your hen has even laid an egg. Figs are figs, 
and fetch five centimes each till August comes. And clever 
boys are like lettuces : in much sun they run all to seed. Your 
precious brute Bruno gives this lad all sun. If I had had 
him ” 

“ Ah !” said Lippo, with a smile and sigh together, and 
girded up his loins and went into the street to see who was 
inclined to play a turn at dominoes ; and told the barber and 
the butcher that the poor boy Signa was trying to do right in 
Bologna, and was studying hard. 

“ Oh, I bear no ill will. We are all poor creatures ; where 
should we be at our best unless the saints were there to inter- 
cede for us ?” said he, with gentle self-deprecation, when they 
praised his kind way of speaking. “ Oh, I bear no ill will ; 
Bruno is hard, and always unjust, and the greed of getting 
gold grows on him ; but some day he will see the wrong that 
he has done. I can wait. It is sad to live ever in estrange- 
ment, but when one knows one’s innocence and good intent, — 
and the poor lad either never was to blame. He was encour- 
aged in rebellion and ingratitude. I have sent him a trifle of 
money by a man that is going to Bologna ; he is in little dif- 
ficulties, so they tell me, and one does not like a boy to sufiFer 


SIQNA. 


267 


for his elder’s fault. Besides, now he has left, he sees who 
were his true friends. Bruno dotes on him, oh, yes, in a mad 
fashion, but hoards for him, and presses poor men he lends to 
as he did to Baccio — poor Baccio Alessi, he is in the bargello 
for another debt ! and all his children starve ! It is not the 
way to bring a blessing on the lad. So I have a mind to tell 
Bruno, only he is so violent, and never speaks to me, being 
ashamed, no doubt. But all that is not the lad’s fault. Nor 
would one visit it.” 

And Lippo sat down to his dominoes, and was so pleased 
with himself that he cheated a little more than usual by way 
of self-reward. He never cheated greatly, because he knew 
that to cheat a little every evening, with success and unde- 
tected, is much more productive and more prudent than to 
cheat with a big audacity, that reaps one golden harvest and 
then is found out, and so forever ended. 

“ You will call him ‘ nephew’ if he should write for a 
theatre and get paid ?” said old Baldo, looking up at him 
through his spectacles as he returned, with some loose notes 
in his pocket of which he would not speak to Nita. 

“ Blood is blood, without the Church or notary, that I do 
think,” said Lippo, gently ; he liked those vague well-sounding 
phrases that pledged nothing. 

Old Baldo chuckled, and smoked a second pipe. Baldo 
settled within himself that he would let all his savings and 
his snug little purchase of land above Giovoli go unrestricted 
to his daughter ; her husband, he saw, was not a man to waste 
money or opportunities, poor-spirited fool though the cobbler 
thought him, as he heard Nita’s voice saluting his return to 
bed with a shower of invectives that rolled through the open 
casement on the night’s stillness up to the Pisan Gate. 

“ My dear,” he heard Lippo’s soft voice answer, — “ my dear, 
I have only been to drink a cup of coffee with the good Canon. 
When he was so gracious as to do me so much honor, how 
could I say no ?” 

Baldo chuckled. 

He did not like Lippo ; he was impatient of him, and con- 
temptuous of him, but he felt a sort of respect for him never- 
theless, as he listened where he sat in the porch. 

Any way, Lippo was a safe man to leave one’s money to, 
and all one’s little outstanding crop of bad debts. 


268 


SIGNA. 


He miglit be poor-spirited, — no doubt be was. A bold 
opponent might wring his neck like a chicken’s. But such 
pretty, neat, ready lying as his would stand him in better 
stead than all the high spirit in the world ; which, after all, 
only serves to get a man into hot water in this life and eternal 
fire in the next. 

Baldo put his pipe out, and nodded to the barber, who was 
taking his neighbors’ characters away by lamplight under the 
Madonna of Hood Counsel, and double-locked his house-door, 
and carried his stout old body to his bed. 

“ I used to wish she had married the other one,” he thought, 
as he laid himself down. “ But he would have throttled her 
in a fit of passion ; he would never have kept her quiet with 
the Canon’s cup of coffee. And he would never have got in 
for me all my bad debts. He would have burnt my ledgers 
as soon as I was dead. He is a fool. I am glad she married 
the clever one.” 


CHAPTER XXVIL 

Nearly two years had gone away. 

It was a still night at the end of September. It was on 
the eve of the vintage. 

The vines lie open everywhere : to the roads, to the streams, 
to the mule-tracks, to the bridle-paths, over the hills, down by 
the water under the cypresses, against the old towers, any- 
where and everywhere, climbing like gipsy children, and as 
little guarded. 

Only when they are quite ripe, then the peasants keep watch 
with their guns at night ; the gipsy children have grown as 
precious then as little queens. Over the dark and quiet coun- 
try stray shots echo every now and then ; perhaps it is a bird 
shot, or a dog, or a fox, or nothing at all, or perhaps a man, — 
it matters little ; if he were stealing the grapes he deserves his 
fate, and, living or dead, will never complain. 

Bruno, like others, loaded his gun and watched abroad in 
these latter weeks when the vintage was so near. 

In September, summer has the day, but autumn takes the 


SION A. 


269 


night. It was the twentieth, and after sunset was cold. He 
wrapped his brown cloak round him, and with his white dog 
walked to and fro the grass paths of his vines, or sat on the 
stone bench outside his house while the hours wore away. 

On the morrow they would all begin to gather, — nearly 
everybody in the Signa country, at the same time and moment. 
Then the wine-presses would run over in the shade of the 
great sheds, and the oxen would munch at their will the hang- 
ing leaves unmuzzled. 

It would be an abundant vintage, and wine in the winter 
plenteous and cheap ; there was joy in all the little households 
scattered over the mountains and the plains, behind the gold 
of their stacks, and under the blue of their skies. 

The hours wore away. The clock of the village church 
midway on the hill tolled them with its sad dull sound ; all 
clocks and bells sound mournful in the night. There was no 
wind; but the smell of the ripened fruit, and of the stone- 
pines, and of the balm firs, was strong upon the air. The 
moon was a slender crescent, just resting on the black edge of 
the mountains before it sank from sight. The turf was pale 
in the shadows, with the faint colors of the leafless crocuses 
and the blush hues of the exquisite mitre-flowers. The screech- 
owl hooted with joy high in the tops of the trees. The bats 
wheeled, like brown leaves blown about on a wild breeze. 
Bruno sat in the fragrant cold darkness, with his old gun rest- 
ing against a hive, and stretched before him the dog. 

He sat thinking of the yield of the morrow, but alert for 
every sound. It was so lonely here that thieves were likelier 
to be daring than in any place with aid nearer, within call ; 
but, on the other hand, there were no tramps from the towns, 
nor idlers from the beggar-haunts ; it was too high to be trav- 
ersed by, or even known to, such as these. He had had frays 
with poachers thrice in all the years he had lived alone there ; 
that was all ; and each time they had been worsted, and had 
fled with his good swan-shot in their flesh. 

As he sat now, when it was past midnight, and the moon 
had vanished behind her mountain, withdrawing her little 
delicate curled golden horn, as if to blow with it the trumpet 
call of morning, he heard steps coming up the steep ascent of 
his own fields, and the fallen leaves rustling and crackling. 
The dog sprang up, barking. Bruno pointed his gun. 


270 


SIGN A. 


He did not speak ; it was not liis way ; if they came there 
after an evil errand let them get their measure and be paid 
for it. He waited. 

It was too dark to see anything. It was of no use to fire 
aimlessly into the cloudy blackness of the clustered vines. 

The steps came nearer, the leaves rustled louder. He lifted 
his gun to his shoulder, and in another second would have fired 
at the wavering shadow that seemed to move the boughs, — 
when suddenly the dog’s wrath ceased ; it sprang forward with 
a yelp of welcome, leaping and fawning. He paused, afraid 
that he might fire on the dog, angered with the beast, and 
astonished. The dog bounded into the darkness, and out of 
the darkness there came a slender swift figure, graceful from 
the vines, as the young Borghese Bacchus. 

Signa stretched his arms out. 

“ Bo not fire ! do not fire ! It is I !” 

Bruno threw his gun upward, and shot the charge olF in 
the air, then, with all his soul in his eyes, caught the boy in 
his strong hands. 

“Oh, my dear ! oh, my love ! I might have killed you !” 

All the great silent longing heart of him went out in the 
tenderness of the words. 

Till this moment he had hardly known how he had longed 
to see the face of the boy. 

After a little he drew Signa within the porch, and went and 
lighted a lamp, and brought it out, and let its rays shine on 
the lad from head to foot, and looked at him again and again 
and again, with his own dark ox-like eyes, dim and yet lumi- 
nous, with all his heart shining out of them, while he never 
spoke a word. 

Signa had changed but little, except that he had grown tall, 
like a young acacia-tree ; he was very pale, and very thin ; he 
looked fatigued and weak ; he had all the soft grace of his 
nation ; his limbs were beautiful in shape, though very slender; 
his throat was like a statue’s, and his delicate head drooped 
always a little downward, like a flower on a bending stalk. 

He was more than ever before like the Endymion of the 
Tribune. 

The moon had kissed him. With earth he had nothing 
- more to do. His eyes seemed to say, — 

“ Why keep me here?” 


SIGNA. 


271 


Bruno felt it — dimly. 

“ Your body is come back,” he said, sadly. “ But ” 

He did not end his phrase. He knew what he felt. But 
he knew hardly how to say it. 

The soul would never come back, — never. 

“ Yes, I am come back,” said Signa, with a smile, answering 
the words and not the thought. “ I would not write. I walked 
all the way to save the money. I thought I should have been 
here before dark. Have I seemed thankless ? What can I say ? 
You have given me more than life. You have given me life 
eternal.” 

“ Hush ! Come in and eat. You look weak. Come in.” 

Bruno, someway, — why he did not know, — could not bear 
the boy to thank him. He gave all his own life for the boy’s, 
— ^just that, — no more, no less. But he could not bear to 
speak of it. 

Leaving the vines to any chance of theft, he took Signa 
wdthin, and heaped for him such rude fare as his house held, — 
bread and wdne, and some fine fruit that had been meant for 
market. He watched him at the meal with fond eyes, as a 
mother might have done, but he spoke little. His heart was 
full. He was so happy. 

“ If you had sent me word you should have had the money 
to travel ; I would have got it somehow,” he said, resting his 
elbows on the table, and still gazing at Signa, while the brass 
lamp burned between them, its wick wavering in the draught. 
“ I did not ask you, dear ; no — Luigi Dini said that you were 
best left undisturbed, and I said. Let him be till his heart 
speaks, — till he remembers and wants to come. Ah, dear, it 
is more than your body that comes back ; it is your heart too.” 

“ Surely,” murmured Signa, but the color rose a little again 
in his pale cheeks, and he drank off his wine quickly. 

“ You have walked far to-day?” 

“ Only from Prato ; and through Carmignano. I thought 
of Gemma. Nothing is ever heard of her?” 

“ Nothing. Palma is well, — a good girl, as good as gold.” 

“ Poor little Gemma !” said Signa, with a sigh ; he could 
not quite forget the pretty golden-headed sullen little temptress 
that had made him play and dance that fair-day on the stones 
of Prato. 

“ If she be alive she is bad. You cannot change a gnat to 


272 


SIGN A, 


a bee,” said Bruno, briefly. “And, dear, do tell me of your- 
self, — there is so much to hear. You have been happy ?” 

Signa’s eyes shone like Endymion’s lifted to the moon. 

“ Happy ! — that is so little. It is much more than that.” 

“ But the people are good to you. You want for nothing? 
You have all you wish ?” 

“ Oh, no, I want for nothing. Perhaps I am hungry some- 
times, and cold ; — the other lads laugh, the masters praise ; — 
the bread runs short, the shirts are worn out, the women say 
so — what does it matter ? It makes so little difference. While 
one has strength enough, and can have faith in oneself, one has 
the future. What do the little things signify ? One does not 
notice even ” 

Bruno was silent. He did not understand. 

“ The angels speak to him, I suppose,” he thought. 

“ Is the Lastra changed ?” said Signa. “ I cannot give it 
gates of gold, — not yet !” 

“How should the Lastra change?” said Bruno, to whom 
it was immutable and eternal as the mountains. 

“ I do not know,” said Signa. “ Only I am so changed 
that it seems to me everything else must be so too. It is as 
if I had been away a thousand years.” 

“ You were so sad of heart for us.” 

Bruno’s face lightened with a deep unspoken gladness. 
All this while that he had been resigned to be forgotten, 
the boy had longed for his old home, and now had tramped 
on foot two hundred miles and more to clasp him by the 
hand ! 

Signa answered with swift questions of a score of things, — 
Tinello and Pastore, and Teresina at the gate, and the harvest 
and the flowers of Hiovoli, and the old priest on the hill, and 
all the things and people of the old life he had left. 

Himself he knew that he seemed to have been parted from 
them a thousand years, not for his regret or for his sorrow, 
but for the immeasurable distance of thought and knowledge 
that divided him from them all, — from that hopeless sense 
“ they cannot understand,” which yawned in an unbridged 
gulf of difference between himself and them. 

“ And to-morrow we begin to gather,” said Bruno, replying 
to him. “ It will take two days or more. The grapes are 
very fine ; the last rains swelled them so. You will see all 


SIONA. 


273 


the people. There is not one dead. They will be so glad. 
No doubt you thought of vintage when you chose the time? 
It was well chosen.” 

“ I did not remember,” murmured Signa, glancing at the 
brown knapsack that he had put away in one corner. ‘‘ But 
as I came along I noticed the vines were ready ; and at Car- 
mignano a woman gave me a ripe bunch. You will be busy 
then all the week ?” 

“ But you will stay the week, and more ?” 

“ If you wish.” He leaned his head on his hand ; he spoke 
wearily ; his face flushed a little with the same uneven change- 
ful color. 

“ You are tired, dear,” said Bruno, tenderly. “ From 
Prato, — it is a long way for you. Very long. And the nights 
cold. You look to have so little strength. You must have 
overworked yourself. Go to your bed, dear. That will be 
best now. We shall have time to talk ; and it is selfishness 
to keep you up ; and with your eyes so sleepy. Look, you 
see the bed is ready. I have always kept it so. Quite ready. 
For I said, Who knows ? — he may get tired of the city or of 
his learning, and come back without one’s knowing. Only I 
did think you might forget; — and you have not forgotten. 
The people will be so glad ; and you will play to them.” 

The boy had walked all the way to see him ; only to see him I 

He had not forgotten. He had needed nothing. He had 
only come back from remembrance and affection. The moment 
paid Bruno for all the twenty long months of solitude and 
toil. 

“You wanted to see me, and you walked all the way !” he 
said, over and over again, — those words, and nothing more. It 
was so incredible to him, and yet so natural. He was grateful, 
as liberal natures are to those who owe them all things and pay 
them with an hour’s tenderness. 

Signa colored a little and looked away. 

“ Yes, I walked ; what of that? It was so long a time, — to 
see you and the Lastra ” 

Then he touched Bruno’s hand with his lips, in soft, caress- 
ing grace. 

“ It was good of you,” said Bruno, simply, and the tears 
stood in his eyes. The boy had loved him always, — never for- 
gotten, — had walked all the way only to see his face again ! 

M* 


274 


SIGN A. 


The eighteen years of labor and of sacrifice and of foj'e- 
thought and of shelter all rolled away from his recollection ; he 
had done nothing, so it seemed to him ; and it was he who was 
Signa’s debtor. Generous natures wrong themselves as much 
as others wrong them. 

“And if ever you should tire and should be of a different 
mind,” said Bruno, setting down the lamp by the little bed. 
“ They say boys do change, — dream of great things, and of 
learning, and then see the cities a little, and the hollowness and 
labor of it all, and grow content to return into the old quiet 
ways, and leave the world to its own burdens, — they say so, 
men who know. Well, if ever it should be so with you, or if 
it be so now, why, there is your bit of land by the brook al- 
ways ready for you as this bed is, and getting better and better 
every year, and yielding more. A safe place for you, and daily 
bread, and the house we would build in no time, — that is, you 
know, if ever you should change and wish for it. There it 
always is. A solid bit of land : — if you should ail anything, 
or be disappointed, or see with different eyes ; that is all, dear. 
Good-night, and the saints keep you. And it was good of you 
to think of me, and to walk all the way.” 

Signa was too tired to hear the words very clearly, and was 
ready to stretch himself wearily on the little familiar mattress 
over which Bruno had been careful to set the blessed palm of 
the previous Easter. Bruno left him and took his gun again 
and went out into the moonless night to continue his watch of 
the vineyard. 

But all the sky seemed light to him. 

The boy had wanted to see him, and had walked all the 
way ! He was quite happy as he sat in the silence and the 
darkness. A great hope was warm around his heart. The boy 
had come back. 

That proof of love was so precious to him that all his years 
of toil were effaced by it, and all his solitude glorified. 

Who could say that the old ways and the old habits, and 
the native air and the native soil, and the freedom of the high 
hills, might not have some sweetness in them after all, and 
rest at home those young, tired, wandering feet ? It was 
possible at least. 

Bruno crossed himself where he sat, with the musket resting 
at his knee, and thanked the Mother of God. He thanked 


SIONA. 


275 


her. He would not pray for anything. He would not ask 
for anything. He was content, — quite content. 

The boy had come back. That was enough. 

“ Only to see me ; only just to see me ! — and walking all 
the way !” he repeated to himself while the hours wore away. 

Dawn came very soon. 

It seemed to Bruno that it had come when the last gleam 
of the moon behind the mountains had shone on the face of 
Signa, with the red vine-leaves against his forehead. 


CHAPTER XXVIII. 

With the sunrise the vintage began. 

Signa opposed nothing ; entered into all the work and all 
. he pleasure as if he were the little fellow who had run home 
vfith his Rusignuolo seven years before. There was an elFort 
in it all ; his heart was not in it ; in his eyes there was the old 
far-away wistful look ; and at times he fell into abstraction 
and silence. But Bruno was too incessantly occupied to notice 
those shadows on his sunshine. The boy was home again ; 
that was enough. .When he saw Signa’s slender brown hands 
pulling down the grape-clusters, and heard his voice calling 
across the hill-side to the men with the teams, he was content, 
— wio utterly content himself that it did not occur to him to 
drt.am that the youth could be otherwise. . And he was very 
proud of him. 

Proud of his soft grace, of his straight limbs, of his delicate, 
serious beauty; proud of that very something about him which 
was so difficult to define, but which seemed to separate him 
from all those around him as widely as the solitary gold-winged 
oriole from the brown multitude of the tree-sparrows. 

Signa had learned other things besides his own art away 
there under the Alpine winds; he had studied all that he 
could, night and day, old lore and new ; — it was not very much, 
but to his old associates it seemed miraculous ; they did not 
understand what it was, but they felt that this young scholar 
was a glory to them. One told another, and from all the 


276 


SIGNA. 


country about, as far as the bridge of Greve, people came to 
see him and speak with him ; and when the good priest chal- 
lenged him in Latin, and he could answer with ease and grace, 
and when the head-gardener of Giovoli, who was a Frenchman, 
spoke to him in his own tongue and was fairly answered in it, 
Signa seemed to his old friends and companions something 
very wonderful, — a little fellow running barefoot and cutting 
food for the oxen only a day ago, as it seemed. 

They said with one another that he could not have been 
Pippa’s son ; — no, certainly, that was surer than ever, — never 
poor Pippa’s son ; — if Bruno’s ! Who knew ? Bruno had 
been famous for his physical comeliness in his younger years. 
Who knew ? — patrician ladies had strange fancies sometimes ; 
their contadini could tell rare tales of some of their love- 
fancies. 

So they gossiped going down the hill after seeing the boy 
in the cool evening shadows or talking with him in the Lastra. 
At last it became settled with them ; the tongue takes such 
grasshopper-leaps from conjecture to affirmation ; — yes, that 
was the secret of it all, they said. Bruno had pleased some 
grand dame too well for her peace or honor, and this was how 
it came that the boy had such tastes and such an air about 
him, and Bruno money enough to make a scholar of him. 
Yes, that was how it was. 

“ We always knew it,” said the women, with a sagacious 
twirl of their distaff, and added that they could name tlie 
erring principessa if they chose, but it was perilous work to 
light truth under great names ; like thrusting burning straws 
under a hornets’ nest. 

As for Lippo, he waited, hearing all they said, and then, 
by accident, was in the street close by the Livornese Gate as 
the boy came down old Teresina’s stairs and stopped with his 
gentlest smile before him. 

“ Dear, we rejoice to hear you do so well,” he said, with 
outstretched hands, knowing his wife was safe over her linen 
washing in the brook underneath the trees by Santa Maria. 
“ It is so sad. Bruno is hard to turn : we are estranged. But 
it was all an error. I was too rough with you about that violin 
when you were little. Yes, that I feel ; I have done penance 
for it often. But we were as good to you as we knew how to 
be, so poor as we were, and with so many children. Indeed, 


SJGNA. 


277 


we loved you always, and Nita nursed you. You and my 
Toto are as foster-brothers. I never can forget all that.” 

Signa put out his hands. 

“ I forgive everything,” he said, gently. “ AVhen one is 
free and away, that is easy. But friends we cannot be ; it 
would be unjust to. Bruno. And I do not know that I do 
well. I cannot tell, — not yet. One may fail.” 

And he went on his way to the church of the Misericordia. 

Lippo went the other way, chagrined. 

“ I wish he would not say that he forgives,” he thought: 
“ it sounds as if one had dealt ill by him. I am glad I did 
not ask him to the house. Perhaps it is all moonshine what 
they say of him. ‘ One may fail,’ he says. Fail in what 
thing, I wonder ? Nita was right. It is as well to wait, and 
be quite sure. Only, whatever happens, Nita nursed him. 
That he never can forget if he should succeed in anything and 
get a name.” 

For Lippo, like many others before him, held that a life 
that rises from obscurity to triumph should look back in grate- 
ful obligation to those who, when it was in obscurity, did their 
best to keep it there. * 

The stone in the mud cries to the butterfly against the 
clouds, “ Come down and kiss me, for when you were a grub 
I did my best to crush you : is not that a link between us ?” 

Signa went on into the little dark church, where his first 
communion with the old masters of his art had opened to him 
the glories that lie in the science of sound. 

“ We will go down to Fiastra,” said Bruno, on the third 
evening, when all the grapes were gathered in. It was so the 
old farm-house was called where all the hill-side danced at 
vintage-time. The bell was ringing from its roof, — an old 
bell, that had on its copper “ Lahore : et noli contristare,” and 
had been cast in the tenth century or earlier. 

They were rich peasants at Fiastra. They had cattle and 
horses of their own. They had a wide rambling dwelling- 
house, with immense halls and large lofty chambers. There 
was a great court-yard in the centre ; the house ran round 
three sides of it ; the fourth side was open to the hill-side, with 
all the landscape shining through a screen of pines. They had 
a numerous family of grown-up sons and young daughters. 
All through the vintage month, while the maize was being 


278 


SIQNA. 


picked, they used to dance there, and ring the bell above the 
roof, and bring all the contadini above and below within 
hearing up and down to the merriment. The youths and the 
maidens shelled the Indian corn, and romped and jested and 
made love ; when night fell, some one played on a mandolin ; 
perhaps there was a pipe or a flute, too, and sometimes some 
wandering musician had a tambourine. They whirled and 
jumped about to the rattling music, while the old people 
smoked or spun, and the babies tumbled with the dogs, 
with the yellow maize lying in a pile, and the calm night 
skies above, and the hill-side shining white in the starlight 
through the colonnade of the graceful, serious pines. They 
had done this in the old house for centuries, always as maize- 
harvest and vintage came round ; prosperous folks, honest, 
simple, and gay ; generation succeeding generation, without 
break, and changing in nothing. 

There are still many such in this country. Soon there will 
be none. For discontent already creeps into each of these 
happy households, and under her hood says, “ Let me in : I 
am Progress.” 

They had always gone down to Fiastra. It was the custom 
on all the hill-side. But since Signa had been away, he had 
had no heart to go there; the lads and the girls were so merry 
and so content in their manner of life, it had made his heart 
ache the more ; why could not Pippa’s son have been so ? 

But now all was well again. It was difierent. The boy had 
come back. “ Walked all the way! — just to see me 1” Bruno 
had said to each neighbor that day, going out of his habit of 
silence in the gladness of his soul. 

"It was early; they were still shelling the last maize; the 
bell was just beginning to sound ; girls were trooping in, in 
their work-day dress, but each had her little string of pearls 
round her throat. Palma, who came among them, had no 
pearls. She was not so much even as a contadina. She felt 
very brown and rough and unlovely beside the grace of Signa. 
She could not keep herself from thinking how Gremma would 
have looked if she had stayed and had lived ; how pretty, 
though having no ornament but her bright glancing hair and 
wild-rose cheeks. 

Palma took a portion of corn and shelled it, sitting apart on 
a bench. She was not content like Bruno. 


SIGN A. 


279 


“ His body has come back, but not bis heart,” she thought; 
“and his feet will soon wander again.” 

“ Will you not dance with me, Palma ?” he asked her, when 
they touched the mandolin. 

Palma looked up and smiled ; but she shook her head. She 
danced like all the rest at other times, but this night she could 
not ; she seemed to herself to have suddenly grown coarse and 
heavy, and to have her feet shod with lead. To be fit for him, 
she thought, one wanted butterfly’s wings and a face like a 
flower’s, — a face like what Gemma’s would have been, if 
Gemma had been dancing there. 

Bruno stood with the elder men and talked of the vintage 
and the new wine, smoking their pipes under the eaves of the 
house, where a great walnut-tree touched the red tiles. 

But all the time his eyes followed Signa. 

He thought, “ He enjoys the old life; he is happy in it; 
he will not go away again.” 

Palma sat and shelled her maize and watched him too, as 
he threw his light limbs about in the careless gestures and 
joyous bounds, which here, without order or figure, do duty 
for the Western saltarello and the tarantella of the South. 

But Palma thought, — 

“ He does it to please them ; he does not care ; he is thinking 
of other things ; he wants to be away.” 

For Palma noticed that his laugh ceased quite suddenly very 
often, as the laughter of one who at heart is not gay ; she noticed 
that he hardly looked at the brown buxom maidens whom he 
whirled round in the measures, but often looked away through 
the stems of the pines to the starlit country, as if the tall 
straight trunks were the bars of a cage ; she noticed that 
when he paused to take breath and came and sat down beside 
her and some other girl, though his mouth smiled, his face was 
grave, and though his words jested, his attention wandered. 

“ He sees the old ways are good, and that there is no place 
like home,” thought Bruno. 

But Palma thought, — 

“ He loves us all still, but he is tired of us. We are dear 
to him still, but we are wearisome to him, and he would like 
to be away.” 

For Bruno deceived himself, because he had hope; but 
Palma', having no hope, had no deception. 


280 


SIGNA. 


After a time, they were fatigued with their romps aud their 
dances, and all rested awhile, cracking walnuts, eating almonds, 
whispering, joking, bandying love-nonsense, with the stars over 
their heads, and the old dark house behind them, with rich 
bits of color here and there in the men’s blue shirts, in the 
girls’ red petticoats, in the children’s brown limbs, in the broad 
gold of the sunflowers, in the glazed terra-cotta of the Annun- 
ciation above the house-door, in the scarlet kerchiefs hanging 
from a casement, as the light of the stars or of the lamp in the 
doorway fell fitfully on them. 

Signa sat a little apart under the walnut-tree ; he had for- 
gotten where he was ; he was thinking of what was dearer to 
him than any man or any woman. He started as they spoke 
to him. 

“Signa! Signa!” the girls cried. “Have you left your 
heart in Bologna? Why are you dreaming there? Come, 
sing us something. Let us see if your grand learning has 
made your voice any sweeter. You have not played a 
note.” 

“ Sing? here ?” he asked, lifting his head in surprise. 

His thoughts had gone so far away. 

Bruno put his hand on his shoulder : 

“ Sing, or play. Who should care to hear you, if not your 
old friends here?” 

Signa had the habit of obedience in him ; he never dis- 
puted any wish of Bruno’s. He took a mandolin from the 
old fellow who was thrumming it for the dancers, — a gray- 
headed farmer, seventy years old, who, nevertheless, could 
string a dance-tune together as prettily as any one, and liked 
to see his grand-daughters skip about like kids. 

No one can make much music with the mandolin, but there 
is no other music, perhaps, which sounds so fittingly to time 
and place as do its simple sonorous tender chords when heard 
through the thickets of rose-laurel or the festoons of the vines, 
vibrating on the stillness of the night under the Tuscan moon. 
It would suit the serenade of Borneo ; Desdemona should sing 
the willow song to it, and not to the harp ; Paolo pleaded by 
it to Francesca, be sure, many a time, and Stradella sang to it 
the passion whose end was death ; it is of all music the most 
Italian, and it fills the pauses of the love-songs softly, like a 
sigh or like a kiss. 


SION A. 


281 


Its very charm is that it says so little. Love wants so little 
said. 

And the mandolin, though so mournful and full of languor 
as Love is, yet can be gay with that caressing joy born of 
beautiful nothings, which makes the laughter of lovers the 
lightest-hearted laughter that ever gives silver wings to time. 

Signa took the mandolin and struck a few broad sweet 
chords, sitting under the heavy shade of the walnut leaves, 
with the pines and the star-lit valley before him; just a few 
chords in the minor key ; sad, and soft, and almost solemn. 

Then he sang. 

He sang the old Misero pargoletto of Leo, which they had 
heard him sing a thousand times when he was a little fellow 
driving the sheep, and then he sang the Tu che accendi of 
Rossini’s Tancred, born from the lagoons of Venice, and 
known wherever a note of music has ever been heard ; and 
then he paused a little while the young men and the girls filled 
the air with their chiming voices that echoed the delicious 
fiimiliar cantilena, in a chorus that vibrated through the pines 
and up to the skies, as if a thousand nightingales were singing ; 
and then with a few sadder chords, sweet and almost solemn, 
he passed on to music that they did not know, airs that were 
quite strange to them, grave recitatives and sweet cantilena, 
and grand airs of prayer and sorrow, and ritornelli, light as 
thistle-down, and cathedral chants as solemn as death ; they 
were all his own, with the freshness of a genius in them that 
had invigorated itself from study, but had borrowed nothing 
and retained its own originality, as the flower takes fresh 
colors from the bees, yet is a flower still, and never is a bee. 

“What is it?” they asked one another; for what with their 
own songs handed down from mouth to mouth, and their little 
wandering theatres, and their love of what is good in melody 
and the traditions of it common in all households, they knew 
by ear so much that is ancient and beautiful ; though they 
could not talk learnedly about it, and though the names of the 
masters were as Sanscrit to them. 

“ What is it ?” they asked one another ; but they soon 
ceased to whisper even that, and could only listen in rapt 
silence. 

It was music that had a familiarity to them, inasmuch as it 
had something of the wild, fresh, hill-born fragrance of their 

24 * 


282 


SIGNA. 


own popular songs, with which they followed the bullocks and 
lightened the toils of seed-time and harvest. But, again, it 
was wholly unlike what they knew, having a great purity and 
rarity in it, — something of the radiance of the old Greek 
music blended with the solemnity of the litanies and the 
misereri of the Renaissance of religious composition. It was 
music in which the voice of the lover pleading to his beloved 
on the moonlit nights of vintage was blended with the'cry of 
the desolate soul to stay the hand of the God that scourged 
it ; it was music — music true to that profound canon of the 
Italian people, “ La musicil, ^ il lamento dell’ amore, o la pre- 
ghiera a gli Dei.” 

They listened, — the girls leaning their arms on their knees, 
and their cheeks on their hands ; the young peasants resting 
against the pine-stems, or stretched on the benches of stone ; 
the old people drawn together underneath the lamps and the 
story of the Annunciation, with their pipe-bowls cold with 
ashes, and their spinning-wheels ceasing to turn. 

The very dogs were silent, and the little tumbling children, 
falling against one another, kept mute, with their curls inter- 
mingled, and their big bright eyes lifted upward. 

The face of Signa was quite in shadow where he sat under 
the walnut-branches ; the mandolin lay motionless across his 
knees ; he sang on, and on, and on, as the young David might 
have sung to the madness of Saul. 

He had forgotten all that surrounded him ; his soul was in 
his music. 

When his voice ceased quite suddenly, he looked at the 
people about him. The women were in tears, the men listened 
breathlessly ; there was a moment’s silence, then they sprang 
to their feet, all of them with one accord, and flung themselves 
on him, and kissed his hands, and his hair, and his clothes, and 
his feet, and shouted, and laughed, and cried, and lifted him up 
on their shoulders, and called out to the moon, just sinking, — 

“ Look at him ! look at him ! Our own little Signa, and 
yet as great as this ! Oh, the beautiful music ! Did the angels 
teach it to you, dear, — the angels you used to see ?” 

Bruno alone stood apart, and Palma sat in the shade of the 
high house-wall. 

When they let him go at last that night, he smiled on them, 
standing bareheaded in the shadows : 


SIGNA. 


283 


“ You are the first to praise me, — I will always think of 
that.” 

Then he broke loose from them, and went quickly away, 
forgetting everything. For his heart was beating loud, and 
his eyes swam, and the faintness of a great emotion made the 
hill-side reel before him for a moment. He wanted to be 
alone. They were only peasant-people, — farming-men and 
girls from the fields, — but if they were moved like that, would 
the world be wholly indilferent ? 

He climbed up the steep path towards Bruno’s home, and sat 
down under one of the pines, and thought. The old house 
of Fiastra was below him : he was out of the hum of the 
voices, but he could have heard dance-music had there been any. 
He was glad it was all silent ; he was glad they could not 
dance again — so soon. 

There was no sound anywhere around him. 

Far down below the lights of the Lastra glistened ; above were 
the fields and the woods and the blue mountain-crest. This 
was his home. He loved it. Nevertheless he said to himself, 
“Every day here is a day lost. How shall I tell it to Bruno?” 

Bruno, — who to every man he met, and to every woman 
coming through the vines, had said always, with such pride in 
his voice, “ He has come back ; he has walked all the way 
only to see me, — only just for that!” 

And Signa never heard him without a rush of blood to his 
cheeks and a rush of shame to his heart, — knowing that it 
was not so. 

He had not been there long before a step crushed the fallen 
leaves and fir-needles, a step ascending with swift, elastic, even 
tread, the tread of feet that have never been trammeled in 
leather. 

“ Dear, are you there?” said Bruno’s voice. 

Signa rose and met him. They went upward together. 

The old house of Fiastra was shutting itself up for sleep ; 
the people were breaking up and going homeward, — going 
without their usual twitter of flute and thrilling of mandolin, 
and without their usual jests and laughter, talking in low 
murmurs of the wonderful boy, who yet was their own little 
fellow, — the little fellow that had been hungry, and footsore, 
and beaten, and made a mock of so many years, in the house 
by the Mother of Good Counsel. 


284 


SIONA. 


The heavens were brilliant. Coma Berenice was setting 
northward, and above the sea-mountains Arcturus shone in 
full splendor, soon to pass away. Perseus gleamed bold on 
his white field of light : he had been shooting fire-arrows half 
August through the sky, and now was still. Very low down 
eastward and southward, as though watching over Borne, the 
strange lone star Fomalhaut hung in its mighty solitude. 
Orion still was hunting in the far fields unseen. 

“ Was that all out of your own head?” said Bruno, abruptly, 
as they mounted together under the pines. 

“ My own music ? Yes.” 

“ It is very fine,” said Bruno, and was silent. His voice 
had lost its happy, hopeful intonation. 

“ Ah, if I were only sure !” said Sign a. 

“ It is very fine,” repeated Bruno. 

He knew it. He could not have told why. He had heard, 
like all his country-folk, the gay grace of Bossini and Cimarosa 
and the grave grace of Donizetti and Bellini, in the little dusky 
crowded theatres of the populace down in the city, in all the 
seasons of autumn and carnival 

It was only a pastime to him, — a sport not fit to fill the life 
of a man. Music was like the grass : it grew everywhere. 
That was what he thought. But he knew that the songs of 
Signa were beautiful, — knew it by the wet faces of the women, 
by the shining eyes of the men. And his heart was heavy 
with fear. 

“ Do they not tell you it is fine where you study ?” he 
asked. “ They must know there.” 

“ Some do,” said Signa, and then he hesitated, and his lips 
were mute. 

“ It is what you care most for — still?” 

Signa drew a heavy breath. 

“ Ah, it is all I live for ! Did I not say you have given me 
more than life, — life eternal ?” 

“ What will be will be,” said Bruno, with the old gloom 
deepening on his face. “ It is not I, nor any one. It is just 
that, — the thing that is to be.” 

“ Fate,” said the boy. 

“ Perhaps that is what you scholars call it,” said the man. 
“ It may be the great God, it may be the Devil.” 

“ May it not be ourselves,” said Signa, “ or others?” 


SIGNA. 


285 


Bruno did not answer. His face was dark. He had neither 
mind nor mood to unravel thought or unweave the subtleties 
of fancy. What he felt was that there was a force stronger 
than he, and always against him. It did not matter what it 
was called. 

They walked on in silence slowly. The moon was gone, but 
all the stars were shining, and there was a little tremulous light 
on the moss under their feet. Signa stopped and lifted up a 
stone that had fallen across a few sprays of cyclamen, and 
raised up the drooping delicate pink heads of that most lovely 
and tender of all blossoms. 

“ Look !” he said. “ My music was the cyclamen, — circum- 
stance was the stone ; what my hand does for the mitre-flower, 
you did for my music and my life. I cannot call that Fate." 
It is something much warmer and much more beautiful to 
me.” 

“ You talk like a poet,” said Bruno, roughly. “ I am an 
unlearned man. I cannot follow figures.” 

Signa threw the stone away, and went on without saying 
more. 

When they had got to the house, Bruno struck a match 
and lighted his brass lamp. 

“ Grood-night,” he said, and would have gone to his bed, 
but Signa stopped him. 

“I have something to say,” he murmured. “Could we 
talk now ? Something I came all the way on purpose to say : 
it could not be written.” 

“ Ah !” said Bruno. 

He sat down on the settle by the cold empty hearth. He 
drew his hat over his eyes. A dull, weary shadow was on his 
face. It seemed to him as if a knife went to his heart. 

And he had said all through these three days to the people, 
“ He has walked all the way to see me, — only just to see me !” 

“ Let us hear it,” he said, and set down the lamp. He 
could not tell what it could be ; but before he heard it all his 
hope died in him. The boy had not come for him, and the 
old life would not hold him. 

Signa remained standing, leaning against the marriage- 
colfer. 

“ My music that you heard to-night,” he said, softly. 
“ That is from an opera I have written. The first, — the only 


286 


SIGNA. 


one. I have called it ‘ Actea.’ Oh, you do not know ; the 
story does not matter. She was the love of Nero, an em- 
peror of Rome, and she a slave. I have studied hard. Yes, 
indeed. It is not to praise myself. It was a happiness, — 
no pain. If only one could learn more ! but the nights and 
the days seem so short, even with sleeping only four hours. 
I have made all the opera myself. The music of course, 
but the story of it and the words too, — all the libretto. I 
would not speak to any one of my idea, and if one be at all a 
musician, one should be just a little also of a poet ; enough 
for that. There is the jealousy of Actea and Pcppea, and the 
triumphs in the Circus Agonistcs, and the martyrdom of the 
Christians, and Nero hearkening to the harping of Typnos ; 
and the death of Nero, and then Actea all alone by the grave; 
— but you heard some of the music, all is said in that ; I 
know that it is good. The great Father Polidria says so. He 
even says it is great. But it will not please the world ; that 
is what he says. He thinks that ‘ cantellero’* began with 
Rossini, who was great, and who had much else besides, and 
has descended to all the little composers that are reigning now, 
and who have nothing else besides, and, in descending, has 
increased and grown worse, and has corrupted the ear of 
the people, so that they only want noise and glitter, and care 
nothing for true harmony or pure cadence. Perhaps it is so. 
He should know. He says that the people have in all the na- 
tions lost their critical faculty and their understanding, and that 
even in opera seria they now desire as much jingling and noise 
and spectacle as in the huffa. And so he thinks that my 
‘ Actea’ would fail, because it has too much of Pergolesi in 

Bruno interrupted him ; 

“ Tell me what you want, — what you come for. I cannot 
understand all these long words.” 

“ I am so sorry,” said Signa, with the soft contrition of a 
chidden child. “ I am always thinking of it, always talking 
of it ; I forgot. I must tire you ; but I hardly know what 
you will say, what you will think. Listen. All my soul, all 
my life, is in the opera. If only it could be heard, I feel sure 
that it would make a great fame for me, and that is what you 


Meaning tinsel. 


SIGNA. 


287 


wish, is it not? You would not have me live and die an ob- 
scure musician, writing for little theatres or teaching song in 
the cities ? Oh, no ! Oh, my God, no 1 it would be better 
to work in the fields here forever.” 

Bruno’s teeth shut close together. 

“ I begin to understand. Go on.” 

And sitting under the eaves of Fiastra that night, watching 
the young men and the maidens dance together, he had said 
in his heart, with security, “ He is content. The old ways 
will hold him !” 

“ You know,” said Signa, still leaning against the old gilded 
coffer, with his face in the glow from the lamp, “ an opera to 
be known must be heard on the stage ; and it must be a great 
stage, and the rendering of it good, or the music will have no 
chance to be great in the world. I have said nothing to you, 
because I hoped so much to send you word of some great 
victory for it, all in a moment, while you were thinking of me 
as only a little scholar. But the Actea was finished in spring, 
and I managed to travel to IMilano, — never mind how, walking 
most of the way, — and there I played from it, and showed it 
to many directors that come to the city, — the score of it is in 
my knapsack, — and they have all wondered at me, and called 
me Mozart, and said that the music was good, some even said 
great ; and the death-chant of the Christians, and the grave- 
song of Actea, they said were sublime. But they were all 
afraid of it. They all thought it too serious, too passionate, 
too thoughtful. I suppose it has not ‘ cantellero’ enough. 
They said it would cost much, and would almost certainly fail 
to please. They are afraid of their money, — afraid to spend 
it and not to see it again. It is that everywhere, money. It 
has half broken my heart. To hear them say that it is 
beautiful, they all grant that, and yet to find not one there 
that will have the courage to give it to the world ! I 
have seen them of all nations, and it is always the same. 
‘ You are a young genius, you are a Mozart,’ they all say. 
Oh, heaven ! how would ever any one have known of Mo- 
zart if they had all dealt with him as these men deal with 
me!” 

Bruno looked up. 

“ Poor lad I” he muttered ; the thought of Signa suppliant 
and repulsed moved him ; he hated the music that thus en- 


288 


SIGNA. 


chained the boy’s soul, but he hated as much those traffickers 
in the labor of the brain, who had made him suffer. 

Signa went on, full of his own thought. 

“ They told me if I would take a homelier theme, with 
tragedy in it, like the Gazza Ladra, it would be better, — as if 
the meanness of the plot were not what destroys the beautiful 
music there ! They were all afraid of my Actea. Oh, you 
do not know what I have endured, — the hope of it, the de- 
spair of it, the waiting, the longing, the beseeching, the think- 
ing every time, ‘ Here is- one who will understand and then 
always the same disappointment at the end. I have been sick 
with the pain of it, mad with it ; but you must not think that 
I lied to you when I said I was happy. I have been happy 
always, because I believe in my opera : I do believe in it 
against everything. It is not vanity. I love the opera ; but 
I love it as if God gave it me. It comes out of me just like 
the song out of the bird. No more. All the summer I have 
toiled after these men, one or other of them ; the city of 
Milano is full of them, getting singers, and players, and melo- 
dies for their theatres, all over the world, for the next winter. 
I have lost weeks and months waiting, waiting, waiting ; and 
often all day without a bit of anything to eat, because they 
do not think — these people — or because they do not know one 
is so poor. I suppose they never want for food themselves, 
and so forget.” 

“ You never told us.” 

Bruno’s voice was husky : his face was dark with troubled 
pain. When he had thought this young life so happy and so 
tranquil and so safe, it had been in conflict and torment, beat- 
ing against the buffets of the world. He was bewildered ; he 
had a dull sense of having failed in all that he had done, — 
failed utterly. 

“ Oh, no : what was the use ?” said Signa. “ It was no fault 
of any one’s: things are so, if one have not money. You gave 
me all you could. I thought the ‘ Actea’ would be taken at 
once. I thought that I should send you word of my triumphs 
while you were still all thinking me a little useless scholar. 
But it was not to be. If they could say that I wrote ill, I 
could bear it. Yes, I would tear it all up, and think the failure 
was in me, and study more, and do better. But they cannot 
say that. The work that I have done is good. The coldest 


SIGNA. 


289 


of them own it. Oh, heaven ! it is that that breaks my heart : 
all my life is in it. I would die this hour — oh, so gladly ! — 
if I could be quite sure that my music would be loved and be 
remembered. I do not know : there can be nothing like it, I 
think : — a thing you create, that is all your own, that is the 
very breath of your mouth, and the very voice of your soul ; 
which is all that is best in you, the very gift of God ; and then 
to know that all this may be lost eternally, killed, stifled, 
buried, just for want of men’s faith and a little gold ! I do 
not think there can be any loss like it, nor any sufiering like 
it, anywhere else in the world. Oh, if only it would do any 
good, I would fling my body into the grave to-morrow, happy, 
quite happy, if only afterwards they would sing my songs all 
over the earth, and just say, ‘God spoke to him ; and he has 
told men what He said.’ ” 

His hand clinched as he paused, his eyes burned, his face 
changed, and his mouth quivered : the madness of a great 
passion was in him, — the pure impersonal hero-passion of 
genius, which only reigns absolute in earliest youth, and whose 
death-note is human love. 

Bruno looked at him darkly, drearily. 

This was the boy that he had thought had walked all the 
way only to look on his own face, and that he had thought 
had only cared for his old home, and come to live forever on 
the calm hill-side ! What could he understand of this im- 
passioned spiritual pain ? — ^he was like a man watching a de- 
lirium that raves in an unknown tongue. 

Between them there was that bottomless chasm of mental 
difierence, across which mutual afiection can throw a rope- 
chain of habit and forbearance for the summer days, but which 
no power on earth can ever bridge with that iron of sympathy 
which stands throughout all storms. 

“ I cannot follow — all that,” he muttered, wearily. “ You 
go beyond me. No doubt you are born for greater things 
than I know. It is dark to me. But you came here for 
something, — some wish, some aid. Tell me that. Perhaps 
I can help you. But I am ignorant. I cannot understand all 
that you say. Tell me the thing you want. I am better at 
acts than at thoughts.” 

Signa, recalled to himself, hesitated a moment: then he 
spoke, with the color changing on his bent-down face. 

N 25 


290 


SIQNA. 


“AVell, all the hot months I have waited on these men, — 
waited and waited, all to no good. They are all afraid. Per- 
haps they think in their hearts that a boy like me — ^yesterday 
a peasant, and now with my shirts in holes, and only nineteen 
years old — perhaps they think I never can be really worth the 
great world’s hearing. Anyhow, they refuse. All refuse. 
‘ Have it played in your own country, and then we will see,’ 
say the foreign ones. ‘ This country is too poor to risk un- 
certain ventures in it,’ say our own people. It is always some 
excuse. Some way they are afraid, — of me or of the music. 
And then no one cares very much to risk new music. The 
theatres fill with the Ballo in Maschera and the Cenerentola, 
and all the rest. They only want them to fill. That is all. 
Nothing is to be done with them. ‘ Comte Ory brings me as 
much as your Actea would were it successful,’ said one di- 
rector to me. ‘ And I have all the Comte Ory decorations, 
and all the singers know it by heart : why should I risk what 
might be half my ruin ?’ For music they do not care, these 
men. No more than the men who sell wine in the wine-shops 
care for the beauty of the vines. But now, — only I do not 
know what you will say ; you will think me mad ; — now, last 
week, in Milano, I have found a director who would take the 
Actea, — ^yes, take it, and bring it out in Carnival in Venice. 
In Venice, — where they made Bossini’s fame, and sang the 
Ti rivedro even in the courts of law ! I do not know whether 
he is a good man or a bad. But I would have kissed his feet. 
For he believes in the Actea ” 

“ Well?” said Bruno, as he paused. 

Signa’s face flushed hotter, then grew very pale. 

“ He will bring it out this coming Carnival, — my Actea !” 
he murmured. “ Only, as the risk is great, he says, he must 
have from me, before he does commence it, three thousand 
francs, one-half the cost of it on his theatre.” 

“ From you ?” Bruno looked at him, doubting his own 
senses. 

“ From me, — yes,” said Signa, and faltered a moment, and 
then threw himself at the feet of Bruno, with that caressing, 
suppliant grace of action which makes an Italian bend Lis 
knee as naturally as a flower stoops before the wind. 

“ Oh, listen ! You have been so generous, so good, so long- 
fufiering, — it is a shame to ask for more, to trespass further. 


SIONA. 


291 


Yes, I know. But, oh, listen to me, just this once again. 
AVhat is the use of life in me if I cannot make men hear my 
music ? I feel I am strong ; I feel I am right ; I feel what I 
do is great : only I have not the means of success in the world. 
Just see a skylark, the bird that mounts, mounts, mounts, ever 
singing ; if it had a stone at its foot it could not mount, and 
so it could not sing ; and yet its song would be in it just the 
same, and it would break its heart because it had to be mute. 
I am like the skylark, — only the stone with me is poverty. 
You see, they have all had some little money. Mozart had his 
father’s help, and Haydn Prince Esterhazy’s, and every one of 
them some little thing just to loosen the stone off their foot 
as they rose first ; and once risen, then no lark wants anything 
more than only just the air and his own two wings. Now, — oh, 
I know it is so much to ask, and in a way it is shameful ; but 
you love me, and I have no one but you, — now, that land you 
bought for me, you send me the worth from it always, and 
you mean to sign it away to me when I am of age, and you 
would like me to live on it forever. Now — now — would it 
be impossible, would it be wicked in me, to pray for it ? — 
would you sell it at once, sell it straight away to whoever 
would buy it, the fields and the olives and all, and give me the 
money for the Actea ? Ah, my God ! — do do it ! My life 
is worth nothing to me, and what should ever I do with the 
land ? It is yours, I know, and I have no right yet ; but if you 
do still mean to give it to me, let me have the value of it now, 
— now, for the Actea, — and deliver me out of this torture, 
and give me a chance to be great. Ah, my God, do hear me I 
— it will be as if you ransomed me out of hell !” 

His head dropped on his hands ; he sobbed aloud ; he knelt 
still at Bruno’s feet, but all drooped into himself like a 
crushed flower. He was ashamed of his own prayer ; and 
yet the passion of his longing shook him from head to foot. 
What use were the land, and the olives, and the rush-shadowed 
brook, to him ? What he wanted was fame eternal. 

Bruno was silent. 

This was why the boy had come back. 

After awhile Signa lifted his head timidly and glanced up- 
ward, Bruno’s face told him nothing : it was dark as a tem- 
pest, and, under all its bronze hue, pale ; but it said nothing ; 
it was like a moonless night. 


292 


SIONA. 


The boy was afraid. He thought there would break upon him 
an outburst of such rage as had shattered his lost Rusignuolo. 

But none came. Bruno was quite calm and was mute. 

“ Will you do it?” said Signa, with a great fear at his heart, 
touching the man’s brown hands with a soft, shy supplication 
like a girl’s. “ Will you do it ? See, you are so strong, so 
good ; you think so much of my body, and my peace, and my 
happiness, — which all are as nothing to me : will you help me 
to save my soul ? will you help me out from this death in life ? 
Dear Grod ! if you knew ” 

A terrible hopelessness seized him and stopped his prayer 
on his lips. Bruno’s face was so dark and so still : there was 
no response in it. A ghdstly despair froze the boy’s beating 
heart. 

How could he ever make this man understand, — this man 
who knew nothing, — this man who followed his oxen, and 
reaped his corn, and was content ? 

Bruno rose. 

“ I will think of it,” he said, slowly ; and his voice, in the 
darkness and stillness of the lamp-lit house, sounded deep and 
hollow, as a brave bell that is broken will sound. “ I will do 
it, — if I see it for your good. I must think.” 

Then he went into the night-air, and drew the house-door 
behind him, and the boy heard the echo of his footsteps pass- 
ing away upward to the higher hills. 

He knew that his prayer would be fulfilled. He did not 
know that for one single instant, as he had knelt there, Bruno 
could have struck him down and stamped his life out with as 
passionate a hate as he once had stamped the music out of the 
broken violin, — one^ instant in which the heart of the man had 
risen and cried against him, — 

“ I have given you all my life, and you bring me back a 
stone.” 

The next day early Bruno went down into the Lastra. He 
went to the sacristy of the Misericordia. 

“ Write to this man of Venice,” he said, briefly. “ Have it 
all in black and white, — what he has said, what he will do.” 

Luigi Dini looked up astonished. 

“ What ! He has told you ! You mean ?” 

“We can speak of it when the answer comes. Write,” said 
Bruno, and went out into the tender sunshine and through the 


SIONA. 


293 


merry ways of the Lastra, that were overflowing with gathered 
grapes and laughing faces, down into the city, to the house of 
the notary who had served him in the transfer from Baccio 
Alessi, the carver. 

“ I may wish to sell my land — that land — in a little while,” 
he said. “ If you find an honest man at a fair price, tell 
me.” 

The notary looked up as the sacristan had done. 

“Sell the land! The land you were so proud of! What 
can that be for ?” 

“ That is no concern of any man’s. When you find the 
bidder, tell me,” said Bruno, and went into the great square, 
where, the day being the market-day, all the men from the vil- 
lages and the villas were chaffering together with sonorous, 
resonant voices, raised high in dispute or discussion. 

“ Bruno is going to do some evil thing,” said the other men, 
seeing the look upon his face. They had been used to tell dan- 
ger from the darkness of his face, as storm from the closed crown 
of Monte Marcello. 

But he did no evil. He trafl&cked with them, driving his 
bargains closely, and giving few words to all, with the glaive 
of Perseus and the bronze head of the Medusa above him in 
the shadow of the arch. 

When the day was ended, he entered the baptistery, and 
prayed there in the twilight. 

Then he crossed the river, and went out of the gates home- 
ward. 

More than one man, going by with swift wheels and little 
jingling bells, and fiying fox-tails at the pony’s harness, stopped 
and offered him a lift ; but he shook his head, and strode on 
alone in the dust. 

It was the “ twenty-fourth hour” — the close of day — when 
he reached the foot of his own hill. The sun was just going 
down behind the great mountain and the sharp peaks that lie 
between the valley and the sea. It was nearly dark when he 
had mounted high enough to see his own roof above the olives. 

He passed Fiastra. 

The bell that said, “Lahore: et noli contristare” was ringing 
loud. 

On the path above there was a little tumult of young men 
and girls running merrily one on another t-o reach the open 

25 * 


294 


SIGNA. 


gates. They had torches with them, flaming bright in the 
dusk, and branches of fir and boughs of the vines that they 
tossed over their heads ; they were shouting, and leaping, and 
scampering, and singing in chorus. As they drew near the 
farm-house, they called out to the people within, — 

“ We have brought him down ! — we have got him ! We 
will make him sing, — our own little Signa, who is going to be 
so great !” 

Four of the youths had Signa aloft on their shoulders. They 
had sought him out where he was moping in solitude, as they 
termed it, and had besought him and besieged him with airy 
laughter and fervent entreaty, and a thousand appeals and 
reproaches of old friends to one who deserted them ; and he 
had not been proof against all that kindly flattery, all that 
tender supplication, which had the honey in it of the first 
homage that he had ever known ; and they had borne him 
away in triumph, and the girls had crowned him with vine- 
leaves and the damask rosee that blossom in hazel and grape 
time, and danced around him in their rough, simple glee, like 
the peasants of Tempo round the young Apollo. 

Bruno drew back into the shadow of the pines, and let them 
pass by him. They did not see him. They went dancing 
and singing down the steep grass paths, and under the arch- 
way, into the court-yard of Fiastra. 

It was a quaint, vivid, pretty procession, full of grace and 
of movement, — classic and homely, pagan and mediaeval, both 
at once, — bright in hue, rustic in garb, poetic in feeling. 

Teniers might have painted the brown girls and boys leaping 
and singing on the turf, with their brandishing boughs, their 
flaring torches, their bare feet, their tossing arms ; but Lio- 
nardo or Guercino would have been wanted for the face of the 
young singer whom they carried, with the crown of the leaves 
and of the roses on his drooped head, like the lotus-flowers on 
the young Antinous. 

Pietro da Cortona, perhaps, in one of his greatest moments 
of brilliant caprice, might best have painted the whole, with 
the background of the dusky hill-side ; and he would have set 
it round with strange arabesques in gold, and illumined among 
them in emblem the pipe of the shepherd, and the harp of the 
muse, and the river-rush that the gods would cut down and fill 
with their breath and the music of heaven. 


SJONA. 


295 


Bruno stood by, and let the innocent pageant pass, with its 
gold of autumn foliage and its purples of wind-flower buds. 

He heard their voices crying in the court, “ We have got 
him ! — we have brought him ! Our Signa, who is going to be 
great !” 

He stood still a little while ; then he went up to his own 
home, and lit his lantern, and foddered his cattle, and worked 
in his sheds. He was too far otf from Fiastra to hear any 
sound of the singing, but every now and then the wind, which 
blew that day from the southeast, brought upward the bursts 
of applause, the enthusiastic shouts, that succeeded the inter- 
vals of silence, — mere murmurs as the wind brought them ; 
but to Bruno they sounded like the echo of the clarion of 
Fame, crying aloud to him from the great world, “ He is mine.” 

It was late when Signa returned, brought back by the young 
men, who left him with caresses and with gratitude as to a crea- 
ture far above them, and went away singing low among them- 
selves in chorus the greatest air that he had written, the chant 
of the dying Christians, which had in it all the majestic mag- 
nificence of the “ Bex tremendae majestatis,” and all the pathetic 
resignation of the “ Huic ergo parce Deus,” of Mozart’s “ Dies 
Irae.” » 

Signa stood on the threshold and listened to the broad 
regular periods, the sonorous, pathetic rhythm of his requiem, 
as the voices rose and sank, and grew fainter and fainter, as 
the steps fell away down the hill-side. 

They were only peasants, only laborers of the flail and the 
furrow ; but they could sing whatever took their ear, with 
unerring truth and time. It was the first time that ever he 
had heard any music of his own upon the mouths of others : 
it was the first time that any of that sympathy which is the 
sweetest part of public homage had ever come to him : he 
stood and listened with a tumultuous pleasure swelling at his 
heart, and a delicious sense of power on the lives of others 
stirring in him. 

“ It will live,” he murmured to himself, as he listened there 
on the threshold until the voices died into silence as the young 
men went on their several ways to their own homesteads, and 
parted. 

Bruno was working still in one of the sheds, his lantern 
burning beside him. He had been sifting grain, stacking 


296 


SION A, 


wood, cleaniDg wine-casks, with the white dog watching him 
and the night wearing away. 

Signa went within, and stood by him a little timidly. He 
had not seen him that day, save for a few moments in the 
early morning. 

“You did not come to Fiastra to-night,” he said, gently, not 
knowing well what to say. 

“ No,” said Bruno, without lifting his head, whilst he piled 
the brush-wood. 

“ Are you angry with me ?” said Signa, with the child-like 
way that was natural to him. 

“ No,” said Bruno, but he worked on without raising his 
head. 

Signa’s mouth quivered a little. He knew that he had 
d» ne no wrong, and yet he was not at peace with himself. 

“ Perhaps I am very selfish to ask so much,” he said, hesi- 
tating a little as he spoke. “ I know I have no right ; I know I 
have no more of my own than the dog there. But indeed — 
indeed — what use would the land be to me ? what joy would it 
bring me ? And you are so good.” 

Bruno paused in his labor for a moment. 

“ I said, I must think. Let it be. Wait a week ; then I 
will tell you. I do not know that jou are selfish. It is I, 
more likely. I will do what is for your good. Only leave me 
in peace. Bo not talk.” 

And he lifted more wood. 

Signa stood by him sadly. He was not satisfied. He knew 
that he had gained what he wished, that his desire would be 
given him. But his victory brought a sense of pain and of 
wrong-doing, as victory over a noble foe does to a soldier. 

Bruno could never measure the height of the boy’s intelli- 
gence ; the boy could never measure the depth of Bruno’s 
nature. In some ways they were forever both strangers one 
to the other. Between human creatures it is often so. 

As he stood there, confused, troubled, mute, Bruno looked 
up with a gesture of impatience, and laid his hand on the lad’s 
shoulder, but gently, for since the day of the broken Rusi- 
gnuolo he had sworn to heaven never to be ungentle with 
Pippa’s son. 

“ I am not angered,” he said. “ But leave me alone. Go 
with your friends ; sing, dance, be caressed, take your pastime ; 


SIGN A. 


297 


enjoy yourself, dear, while you can. Do not think that you 
have hurt me : only leave me alone. It is not a thing to be 
done in a day. But you may trust me. What is best for you, 
that I will do : only I will not talk of it.” 

He thrust him, gtill gently, out of the shed into the night- 
air against the open house-door. 

“ It is late. Go to your bed.” 

Signa went, and climbed up to his own room, and opened 
the old drawer and looked at his broken violin lying where he 
had left it, with its rosemary and its sprigs of cypress, as if it 
were a dead thing in a coffin. 

“ Perhaps the world will prize you some day,” he thought, 
“ as it does the old wooden shoe of Paganini.” 

He was happy because he had faith in himself, and hope ; 
almost as happy as when the fair angel had given him the 
Busignuolo ; but he had a heavy sense amidst his joy of hav- 
ing sinned against Bruno. 

He only partly understood the pain that he had dealt. He 
only dimly saw how the man who had believed that his return 
had been one of love was wounded to the quick by the revela- 
tion that ambition and personal desire and immediate need had 
been the sole impulses moving him. He only very vaguely 
comprehended how to ask Bruno to give up the land which he 
had slaved for seven years to gain was to shatter at a blow all 
the pride of his days, all the hope of his life. 

The great genius overmastering him was like a cloud before 
his eyes. If he were cruel to Bruno, he was cruel uncon- 
sciously ; as he was cruel to his own body in inflicting on it 
hunger and cold and all corporal ills whilst he followed the 
spirits that beckoned to him. 

If he asked Bruno to give up much, he himself was ready 
to give up everything. If it could have been said to him, 
“ Die now, and your music shall live,” he would have accepted 
the alternative without pausOj and gone to his death rejoicing. 

It was the sublime fanaticism of genius, which, like all other 
fanaticism, is cruel. The desire for glory had entered into 
him, as yet impersonal, but none the less all-absorbing and 
dominant. 

Once he had been content to have leisure and rest, to hear 
the “ beautiful things” of his fancy. Now he had no peace 
unless he could repeat them to the world of men ; as at first 


298 


SIGNA. 


the lover is content with the perfect possession of his mistress, 
but, when this has been enjoyed a while in secret, grows 
restless for the world to know the joy that crowns his 
passion. 

The days passed away with him in a fever of unrest, eating 
little, sleeping little, vaguely consoled and elated by the hom- 
age liis old comrades gave him, but missing much of the 
beauty of autumn, because the unrest of ambition was in him. 
The little pale crocus would not tell him half the things it had 
whispered him in his childhood, and the great winds wander- 
ing among the pines had lost much of their melody for him. 
He was always thinking, “Will they kill my soul in me? 
Shall I die unheard and unknown ?” 

Palma came up no more to Fiastra : she stayed down in 
her father’s house, washing, mending, ironing, scrubbing, hoe- 
ing, toiling. 

“ I am nothing to him,” she said to herself. “ If I had 
been Gemma, he would have made his songs about me.” 

Signa strayed sometimes into Giovoli, indeed, as he went to 
old Teresina’s and other places that he had known ; but he 
was always thinking, thinking, — always absorbed ; sometimes 
seeming to listen, and then writing music on any scrap of 
paper from his pocket, and at other times singing over softly 
to himself the recitatives and the airs of his Actea. 

The two weeks of uncertainty were torture to him. His 
hope and fear were in equal portions, and each possessed him 
by turns to all exclusion of the other. 

“ I thank heaven, lad, you did fail at the school of design 
in the city, and came home to make honest tubs and churns 
and buckets,” said Cecco the cooper to his own youngest son 
in the workshop with the vine behind the barred window. 

They all had a dim sense that Signa was going to be great; 
but they most of them thought it a bad thing, a^ pitied him, 
and pitied Bruno for not having a good, strong, contented 
youth, who would have helped him with the land and held it 
after him. 

As for Bi-unc himself, he never spoke to any man of the 
boy or of the land. 

Letters came and went. Luigi Dini and the notary, who 
was a good man and kindly, puzzled the matter out together, 
and dealt with it cautiously and carefully. Weeks went by 


SIGNA. 


299 


with all things unsettled. At length the sacristan called 
Bruno down into the Lastra, and said to him, — 

“ The man of Venice is an honest man. There is no fear. 
If the half of the cost be paid, he will produce the work in 
Carnival and do it all justice. There is no fear. He will not 
say it will succeed, but he will give the test. He is a true 
man, as such men go, living by their own wits and the brains 
of others.” 

Bruno shaded his eyes with his hand a few minutes; then 
he nodded his head to the sacristan and drove to the city and 
said to the notary, “ Sell the land.” 

The notary had some time before found with ease a man 
who was willing and able to buy, — money down, with no palter- 
ing or pilfering. 

“ The deeds shall be ready by the week’s end,” he said 
now ; and he sent and called in the buyer, a stranger to Bruno 
and a dweller in the city ; and they shook hands on the bar- 
gain, and it was concluded beyond possibility of change. 

Bruno did not speak once. 

“ Does he sell under pressure of debt, that he looks so 
dark ? It is whispered about,” said the buyer. 

“ Then a lie is whispered about,” said the notary. “ He sells 
because he chooses to sell. And it is his way to look like 
that.” 

But the notary thought to himself, “ The man is a fool. The 
boy has a pipe like a chaffinch, and so the good land is to go 
in a puff of sound. The boy must be his owd, or he would 
never do so.” 

For the notary, though he dealt with the letters to and from 
the city of Venice because he was paid to do so and it was no 
business of his, was sincerely sorry that the solid soil was be- 
ing bartered away for a lad’s silly dream, and was sorry, more- 
over, for Bruno. 

“ It will all end in vapor, and the boy will die in a garret. 
It is always so,” said the notary, though his own dwelling- 
house was close against a wall on which was written “ Qui 
nacqui Cherubini.” 

Then he entered his own house. 

Signa was sitting by the oil-lamp, writing music. He sel- 
dom did any other thing. His hand on the dark oak table was 


300 


SIGNA. 


white and small as a girl’s; his 'cheeks were flushed with a 
feverish color ; he looked weak, and he was very thin. 

Bruno went up behind him and laid both his hands on his 
shoulders. He did not care for the boy to look up at his 
face. 

“ Hear, it is done,” he said,' gently. “You have got your 
desire. Your music will be heard in the winter. Ask Imigi 
Hini the rest.” 

Then he left the room and locked himself in the loft above 
the stable of Tinello and Pastore. He could not trust him- 
self to speak more. All the night he had no sleep. 

He went out again while the stars were still shining. 

Bruno went down to the little brook rushing away under 
its reeds, to the great fields corn-sown, to the narrow grass 
paths under the gnarled olives. 

Kings leaving their kingdoms have suffered less than he 
losing this shred of land. 

Nine years he had labored on it, giving it the sweat of his 
brow and the ache of his limbs, and all the stolen hours that 
other workers gave to rest or pleasure ; and now it was going 
from him as sand runs out of a glass. 

All the toil was over and useless. All the nine years were 
passed like a breath of smoke, and left no more tale or worth. 

He sat down by the edge of the bright water. It was day- 
break. No sound stirred upward or downward on the great 
hill. 

He was quite quiet. He had the dull dark look on his face 
that had come there when the boy had first asked this gift at 
his hands. He said to himself that what befell him was just. 
On that spot by the rippling burn he had shattered the boy’s 
treasure : it was only meet now that he should lose his own. 

He did not waver. He did not repine. He made no re- 
proach, even in his own thoughts. He had only lost all the 
hope out of his life and all the pride of it. 

But men lose these and live on ; women too. 

He had built up his little kingdom out of atoms, little by 
little, — atoms of time, of patience, of self-denial, of hoarded 
coins, of snatched moments, — built it up little by little, at 
cost of bodily labor and of bodily pain, as the pyramids were 
built brick by brick by the toil and the torment of unnoticed 
lives. 


SIGNA. 


301 


It was only a poor little nook of land, but it bad been like 
an empire won to him. 

With his foot on its soil he had felt rich. 

He had wondered that men lived who spent their souls in 
envy. 

It had been his ambition, his longing, his dream, his victory ; 
labor for it had been as sweet to him as the kisses of love ; 
and when he had made it all his own, he would not have 
changed places with princes or with cardinals. 

And now it was gone, — gone like a handful of thistle-down 
lost on the winds, like a spider’s web broken in a shower of 
rain. Gone, never to be his own again. Never. 

He sat and watched the brook run on, the pied-birds come 
to drink, the throstle stir on the olive, the cloud-shadows steal 
over the brown, bare fields. 

The red fiush of sunrise faded. Smoke rose from the dis- 
tant roofs. Men came out on the lands to work. Bells rang. 
The day began. 

He got up slowly and went away ; looking backwards, look- 
ing backwards, always. 

Great leaders who behold their armed hosts melt like snow, 
and great monarchs who are driven out discrowned from the 
palaces of their fathers, are statelier figures and have more 
tragic grace than he had, — only a peasant leaving a shred of 
land no bigger than a rich man’s dwelling-house will cover ; 
but vanquished leader or exiled monarch never was more deso- 
late than Bruno, when the full sun rose and he looked his last 
look upon the three poor fields, where forever the hands of 
other men would labor, and forever the feet of other men 
would wander. 

On the morrow, the notary in the street of the Bed Gate 
saw duly signed and sealed and attested the deed which gave 
the land by the brook on the hill that is called Artemino. over, 
from Brunone Marcillo, to one Aurelio Avellino, cheese-seller, 
in the city of Florence. 


26 


302 


SIGNA. 


CHAPTER XXIX. 

It was a winter’s night in the Lastra. 

The cold had been severe. It was the first month of the 
Young year. Snow was resting on the barbican and watch- 
towers of the Porta Fiorentina and on the ledges and battle- 
ments of all the old walls. It melted every morning when the 
noon sun touched it, but it lay there every night. The villas 
were all deserted. The nobles were down in their palaces in 
the city. The little churches rang their bells regularly over 
the barren solitary country, like soldiers firing over a forsaken 
field. The rivers were swollen, but had not overflowed ; every 
little thread of water was swelled into a brook, and every hill- 
fed brook into a torrent. The people were hard pressed at 
times for food and oil. There was a good deal of suffering in 
the little homesteads, — most of all in those set high on the 
hill-sides and the mountain-crests, that were swept by the bitter 
fierce winds from the north, where the dwellers could see no 
faces save those of their own households, until spring should 
have come and made the mule-tracks passable again. Even 
down in the Lastra things were not very bright ; for the people 
are poor, and the taxes are many. It was high carnival in the 
great towns, but they had not much to do with that. Now 
and then some groups of men and girls went down to join the 
mummery in the city, with masks on and ribbons fluttering, 
and came back white, not with snow, but with the flour-pelt- 
ing ; and for the midnight fair, under the gallery of the Medici, 
the contadini dressed up their wine-barrels in quaint guise, 
and the straw-plaiters took their prettiest baskets and tassels 
and hats and toys, and the best-looking maidens went down 
with the best winter fruits, to stand and laugh behind the 
flaring torches under the evergreens and the flags, and, per- 
haps, have a waltz and a scamper down the broad pavement, 
with the stars shining above, and the tambourines and cymbals 
clashing, and the Vecchio frowning on the pastime and the 
blaze. 


SIGN A. 


303 


Otherwise the Lastra had nothin" to do with Carnival, 
except that now and then it put a fat goose in its pot or 
munched a bit of toothsome strong bread from Siena, or had 
a set of strolling players in the old Loggia that used to be a 
hospital in the days when Antonino preached charity as the 
saving of men, and uprooted his damask rose-trees in the eternal 
antagonism of Theology and Nature. 

It was a winter’s night in the Lastra. It was the first night 
of the midnight wine-fair in the city, and the noisiest folks 
were away. In the wine-shop, however, of one, Sanfranco, a 
good merry-man and a son-in-law of old Teresina, a score or 
more of people, men and women, were gathered. The great 
w'ooden nail-studded doors of the arched entrance were shut 
to against the driving wind. The oil-wicks burned brightly, 
though they could only dimly light up the dark-vaulted cavern- 
lik^ entrance-room ; but long branches of trees flamed on the 
dogs, and Sanfranco sold good wine, and his wife was a popular 
soul and made the best macaroni in the commune, and a bough 
outside his door always showed that hunger as well as thirst 
might be allayed wdthin. 

At the moment no one was eating or drinking. The straw- 
covered flasks stood about unnoticed. The pipes had grown 
cold. Old Teresina, who was at supper with them, had her 
distaff' idle and both hands on her knees, as she strained her 
earsjto hearken. Men and women sat and leaned around in 
various postures, but all with the same stillness and intentness, 
listening. Sanfranco himself forgot to chalk the scores of the 
night ; and his wife, for once, let her frying-pan frizzle itself 
into blackness. They were all gathered together in absorbed 
attention. The sacristan of the Misericordia sat in their midst : 
his spectacles were on his nose, his especial lamp burned close 
at his elbow : he had a newspaper in his hands, and other papers 
crumbled at his feet. He had been reading aloud some time ; 
his glasses were dim with mist, his voice faltered, and his sight 
almost failed him, as he continued : 

“ What shall we say of this child ? for he is no more than 
a child. Rossini was twenty-one when Venice first welcomed, 
with one voice, his mighty ‘ Tancred.’ This lad is even younger. 
We predict for him a fame even greater than Rossini’s. Since 
our grandfathers worshiped Cimarosa, there has been no parallel 
to the rapture of this city at the ‘ Actea.’ The grave-song of 


304 


SIGNA. 


Actea is on every woman’s lips to-day ; the death-chant of the 
Christians is echoed by every gondolier. All the air and all 
the waters seem full of this new music, which to the most perfect 
freshness of fancy unites the severe grace and sonorous harmony 
of Durante and Pergolesi. If it has a fault at all, it is too pure. 
It has the passions of faith, of heroism, of aspiration ; it has 
not the passion of love ; it belongs to the soul ; it has passed by 
the senses. This is the result of his youth. It is more divine 
than it is anything else. But its exquisite beauty, its truth to 
all the requirements of the noblest musical art, above all, its 
real sublimity of conception, have carried all before it. There 
has been no such scene as that of last night in Venice since 
Rossini’s Aria di Guzzi rose on every tongue. All the city was 
in tumult. Men and women wept like children. From the first 
act, which opens with the chorus of the gladiators, to the last, 
which closes on the grave of Nero, there was not for one 
moment doubt or coldness in the audience. Its reception was 
an ever-increasing tempest of delight. Men who had gone 
listless and even hostile were overborne and carried away 
by the universal enthusiasm. The young artist could not be 
found at the moment the opera commenced. When the second 
act had passed, and such a furore as might have wakened the 
very dead shook the house from floor to roof, he was found 
hidden in one of the dark unused passages below the stage. 
He had fainted ” 

The old man paused ; his voice was choked with emotion ; 
he let the paper fall at his feet. 

The men gave a deep glad shout ; the women sobbed aloud. 

“ My pupil ! yes, I may call him that,” murmured Luigi 
Dini. “ I taught him all he knew — at first.” 

Then he took up the printed sheets, and went on with his 
slow measured reading: 

“ When at length he came before the people, he looked more 
like some beautiful pale young ghost of Desdemona or of Fran- 
cesca, than like a youth who had fought his battle with the 
world — and conquered. When all was over, the people got 
hold of him, clambering on the boards to reach him, and car- 
ried him aloft on their shoulders, and bore him out into the 
air, smothered with the flowers and the handkerchiefs of 
women. A whole fleet of gondolas accompanied him home- 
wards. The great chant had caught the ear of the whole city. 


SIGNA. 


305 


The nobles of Yenice seized him, and bore him away to 
a brilliant feast. They sang it as they took him to his home. 
They sang it under the windows. They brought him out again, 
and again, and again. The night rang with their cheers, and with 
the echoes of his music. It was not until morning that any- 
thing like order or stillness prevailed. Like the southern poet 
who loved Venice so well, he awakes, and finds himself famous. 
It is said that he is a little contadino, the son of a contadino 
also, in a village in Tuscany, and that all the study he has ever 
had has been a year and a half in Bologna. It is said, too, 
that his friends are so poor, and he so penniless, that yesterday 
he had not a coin to buy himself a crust of bread. He calls 
himself only Signa.” 

Luigi Hini caught his breath a moment, and his withered 
lips quivered. 

“ Then they pass on to speak of the music, critically, and in 
detail,” he said, striving to seem calm. “You will not care to 
hear that. It is too long. But, you see, we were no idle 
dreamers, no mere weavers of cobwebs. You see, my boy is 
great.” 

“ My little Signa, that I hid in the coffer !” cried old Tere- 
sina, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, yet laughing 
in her joy. 

“ Little Signa, that Nita beat like a dog !” said her daugh- 
ter, laughing and crying too. 

- “ Little Signa, that thought it such a fine thing to have a 

bowl of soup with the children on Sundays !” said Sanfranco 
himself. 

“ Little Signa, that we thought no better than a baby !” 
said his son, a strong, lusty young blacksmith. 

“ Little Signa, that is only Pippa’s son !” said Cecco, the 
cooper. “ Only Pippa’s son ! and that base-born.” 

“ Little Signa no more,” said Luigi' Dini ; “ and base-born ? 
what does that matter ? God has called him into the light 
of the world.” 

“ Will he ever look back to us ?” murmured the old woman, 
with the slow tears falling down on her hank of flax. 

“ Never mind. We will look up at him,” said the old man 
gently. “ But I do not think he will forget. We do not 
think the stars see us in the daytime, but if we go down into 
a well, we see that they do just the same : so will it be with 

26 * 


306 


SIONA. 


him. The great light may hide him from our sight, but he 
will see us all the same.” 

They were all silent. 

“ Did he write anything himself?” said Cecco the cooper, 
after a pause. 

“ He wrote, ‘ Tell Bruno,’ and sent me all these papers. 
That was all.” 

“ Bruno !” echoed the cooper, who was his friend. 

They had none of them thought of Bruno. 

“Poor Bruno,” said the old man, sadly; he was thinking 
of the price that Bruno had paid for the night of victory in 
Venice. 

“ You cannot go up to him to-night,” said Sanfranco : “ the 
hill-paths are perilous.” 

“No. The post came so late, too, from the state of the 
roads. I will go up the first thing in the morning.” 

“ Perhaps he will be in here to-night. I think he went 
through to the wine-fair. I think he had to go ; y^s, he said 
so.” 

“ Yes, he said so,” echoed Cecco. “ But only to take wine 
to Salvio’s stall. He will not stay.” 

“ Does he expect to hear this news to-night?” 

“ Not to-night,” said the sacristan. “ The man of Venice 
has dealt so ill with the lad, putting off, putting off, till here is 
nigh the close of the Carnival. We began to think that he 
would cheat us utterly. He had a ballet that ran well. He 
did not care. No. Bruno has ceased to hope. ‘ What is done 
is done that is all he has ever said about it.” 

“ It is a wonderful glory !” said the woman. “ Read us 
again. Read us again, good Luigi.” 

And he read again, the story which already he knew so 
well by heart that it mattered little that his eyes swam so 
often, and that the printed letters were wrapped in mist. 

As he read this second time, the heavy iron-beaded door 
swung open, letting in a blast of bitter frosted air, that almost 
blew the lights out ; a man came into the room, shaking snow 
at each step on the red bricks, and muffled in his thick brown 
cloak, wearing it across his chest and his mouth, in the same 
fashion that Dante and Guido Cavalcanti on^e did theirs. 

It wag Bruno. 

His baroccino stood without, with the mule tired and cold, 


SIGNA. 


307 


and the candle dark in the lantern that swung from the shafts. 
He had deposited the wine at Salvio’s stall, and had come 
away, leaving to others the riot, and dance, and glee, and jest, 
and mumming, and masking of the great Carnival fair, under 
the arches of the galleries on the edge of the Arno. 

In many a by-gone year he had been the wildest there, with 
rough jests over the sale of the wine, and rough wooing of 
the women’s torch-lit graces, and mad dancing with black 
dominoes and rainbow-hued maskers, while the drums and 
flutes had resounded through the great arcade till the daylight 
broke. 

“ Sanfranco, will you give me a light ?” said he, coming 
into the midst of them with the rush of cold air ; “ mine is 
gone out, and the frost makes the hills bad driving.” 

Then his sight fell on the sacristan with the printed paper, 
and he glanced over all the faces of the others, and read them. 

He strode up to the old man. 

“ There is news of him ?” he said, under his breath, with 
passionate thirsty eyes. # 

“ Yes, great and good news,” said Luigi Dini ; but his feeble 
voice was drowned in the deep shouts of the men, and the 
women’s shrill cries, each eager to tell the tale the quickest, 
and to be the first. 

“ Great and good news !” they clamored. “ All Venice is 
mad for him, Bruno. He has taken the city by storm. The 
people have feasted him, and chanted him all the night long. 
Only think ! only think ! Just our own little Signa. Just 
Pippa’s son, — as you say. He is great. He is famous. He 
has all the world after him. Only think ! only think !” 

Bruno stood in the centre of them, the snow falling in 
flakes oif his garments, his eyes turning bewildered from one 
to another. Then he put his hand up before his sight, like a 
man blinded with a sudden blaze of light. It was so hard to 
understand. It was so hard to conceive as possible. 

“ Do they laugh at the boy? or at me?” he muttered, with 
the anger of a sudden suspicion awakening in the flash of his 
glance. 

“No, no! No, no!” said Luigi Dini; “who would have 
the heart to make a mock of it? And what is there so 
strange ? It is what we hoped and prayed for, only it passes 
beyond all our prayers. The lad is great, — yes, do not look 


308 


SIGN A. 


so. The dear child is great, and his future is safe. God is 
good ; and you sold the land not in vain.” 

Bruno dropped down on a bench that stood near. 

“ God is good,” he muttered. 

They were all silent. They could not shout and chatter and 
praise and wonder any more. There was that in his intense 
stillness which overmastered and awed them. 

Whether it were pain or thankfulness they could not tell. 
Whichever it was, it was beyond them. 

Sanfranco was the first to speak. He touched Bruno on the 
arm. 

“ Stay here in the warm, and let him read you the news, — 
such news ! We have heard it twice over, but we can well 
bear it thrice. I will see to your beast. Do not go back to 
the hills this rare night. We ought to have a bonfire on the 
roof of the big gate. Stay with us.” 

Bruno rose to his feet, still with that unsteady dazzled look 
on him like a man wakened by a blaze of fire. 

“No,” he ^aid, absently. “No. See to the mule, — he is 
cold and lame. Come away with me, Luigi. Let me hear, — 
all alone.” 

The old sacristan made a gesture to the others to be quiet 
and cease from their pressing, and gathered up all the papers. 

“ Yes. We will go to my quiet little room. It will be 
best,” he said, and put his hand on Bruno’s arm and guided 
him out of the doorway into the dark freezing night. It was 
but a stone’s throw to the sacristy. Bruno went out like a 
blind man. Sanfranco followed them, and put up the mule 
in his stable. 

“ One would think he was not glad, after all,” said he to his 
wife, returning. 

“ Nay, he is glad and thankful j” said his old mother-in-law, 
who was clipping an oil-wick. “If it had not been for his 
labor, who would ever have heard of the dear little lad ? But 
— look you — the stars may see us in the day, as Luigi says, 
mayhap they do ; but if a star were all one had to love, it 
would be hard work to feel the loneliness and the cold close 
in, and sit in the dark water of the well and only catch a 
glimpse of the star now and then shining ever so far away 
up in the light of the sun, — and we out of the light for- 
ever.” 


SIGN A. 


309 


“ That is true, mother,” said Sanfranco. “ But you talk 
like a book.” 

“ Nay, nay, never so ; I talk sense,” said the old Teresina. 
“ But that is how it will always be with Bruno and Pippa’s 
boy ; just the well and the star, — just the well and the star : 
do you see ?” 

“ I see,” said Cecco, the cooper who loved Bruno ; and he 
emptied half a flask of wine. 

The gray dawn came into the little room by the Misericor- 
dia Church, with the black cross-bones and the memento mori 
everywhere about it, and beyond its lattice the old broken 
battlements and the dull winter skies. 

He had it all read to him, — over and over again. He sat 
leaning against the table with his head on his hands. 

He understood it all ; he understood it ; the fame of the 
arts is that which is most intelligible to the peasants of this 
country, those descendants of the men who ran weeping and 
laughing before Cimabue, and filled the churches to hearken 
to the oratorios of St. Philip Neri. 

They understood it by instinct. 

So did he. But it was still like a sudden blaze of flame, so 
close to his face that whilst he was dazzled by it his eyes were 
darkened and sightless. 

Was he thankful ? — yes, he thanked God. God was good. 
So he said from the depths of his heart. 

Living for the world, the boy was dead for him. 

And yet he thanked God. 

Time went away, and he took no count of it. His feet and 
limbs were cold, but he had no sense of it. The little lamp 
paled and the chilly dawn came, but he had no perception that 
it was morning. He sat thinking, — thinking of this wonder- 
ful thing which that night had brought : of this distant city, 
where the little fellow who had run barefoot by his side was 
raised up as a prince among men. 

Affection quails before the supremacy of art ] as art in its 
turn cowers under the supremacy of passion. 

The boy was dead to him ; that he knew. The old man 
who had sat quiet and patient, sleeping a little and waking up 
to warm his hands over his little pot of ashes, touched him at 
last, almost frightened at the silence and the stillness with 
which he leaned there, with his head on his hands. 


310 


SIGNA. 


“ The dear, good lad !” he said, softly. “ He will write 
himself ‘ princeps musicorum’ after all ; ay, we always said 
it, he and I, dreaming here together, the old fool and the young 
one, as they used to say. But do not lament for it, Bruno ; 
I mean, do not sorrow for ourselves. He will not forget. He 
is too true of heart.” 

Bruno shivered a little, waking to his first sense of the. cold 
that had frozen around him. He rose : he smiled a little. 

“ I will pray that he may forget,” he said, slowly. “When 
he remembers, then he will have dropped down from this 
height. He was my lark. I broke his cage. Let him go 
up — up — up. Why should he fall — for me?” 

He spoke dreamily, and he had his hand before his eyes, 
with the same dull sense of confusion and oL wonder which 
had come upon him when he had first listened to the news. 
He put out his hand and grasped Luigi Dini’s in farewell. 

“ Tell him I have heard,” he said. “ Tell him I am glad. 
What money I can I will send. There is nothing more to 
say.” 

Then he threw his cloak over his mouth and went down 
the staircase through the little church that was quite dark. 
Luigi Hini, fumbling with the keys, unlocked the door and let 
him out ; he passed up the street towards the seaward gate, 
without remembering that his mule stood in Sanfranco’s stable. 


CHAPTER XXX. 

Was he thankless? 

No. He thanked God. 

God was good : so he said from the depth of his soul. 
Had not the boy his desire ? But Bruno said, “ God is good” 
as the Argive mother said it when in answer to her prayer for 
their blessing her sons were smitten down dead. 

She did not doubt the goodness of her gods : nor did he 
that of his. 

But as the woman’s heart was rent in two by the fulfilling 
of her praj^er, so was his now. 


SIGNA. 


311 


Some faint hope had been alive in him which he had hated 
because it was hope, which he had plucked at to pluck out 
from his soul as the basest and meanest of crimes: some faint 
hope, cruel, irrepressible. 

As he went, some men and women coming from the fair, 
merry and loud-tongued from wine, tossing their masks by the 
strings and flinging white comfits and pellets of chalk one 
from another up against the closed casements and the iron 
bars, reeled against him as he passed, and recognized him. 

“ Ah, Bruno, black Bruno !” they called to him, half drunk- 
enly. “ There is rare news of your little lad in the city, of 
Pippa’s son as you call him. A lion in Venice, a lion with 
wings I Such a fuss never was. The boy is a great man, 
just at one leap. Bravo! Why not? We will have his 
music down in Florence at Easter. If he be your own boy, 
say so now. Claim him while you can get him. Another 
year he will be too flne to notice you, — oh, they are all the 
same, those sweet-throated birds, when they get a nest of gold 
and a bough of laurel to sing in — che, che 1 — he will be like 
the rest.” 

Bruno passed them without a blow or a word. And yet men 
had often hurt him less, and all his blood had been in flame, 
and his steel had been in their flesh. 

The maskers, laughing, dashed their chalk up at the grated 
casements, and reeled noisily through the still sleeping Lastra ; 
he walked away over the bridge, with the mountain-wind fierce 
in his teeth. 

The solitary bell of his own little brown church was ringing 
for the fast mass when he reached the hills above the farm of 
Fiastra, tolling sadly through the gray winter fog. 

He entered it, and prostrated himself on the stones. 

There was no one there save the old priest officiating ; the 
candles burned dully, the white mist had got into the church, 
and the vapors of it hung about the altar ; tlie voice of the priest 
seemed to come from a cloud. Some sheep left out all night, 
forgotten by the shepherd, had crept in, and lay huddled to- 
gether under one of the pillars ; the north wind blew loud 
without, 

Bruno kneeled there in the dampness and the darkness and 
the bitter cold. 

“ 0 God, save the boy always,” he prayed with all the might 


312 


SIGNA. 


of his heart. “ Do not think of me : if I starve here, if I burn 
hereafter, it does not matter: I am nothing. Only, save the 
boy.” 

So he prayed again and again and again, with his forehead 
on the stones, and his heart going out to the great unknown 
powers he believed in with a mortal agony of supplication. The 
world was as a fiend to him that wrestled with him for the 
soul of Pippa’s son. Of himself he could no nothing. 

Would heaven be on his side? 

Would the great, quiet angels stir and come down and have 
pity ? 

When the mass was over, and the old priest, thinking the 
church empty, had gone away to break his fast, the shepherd, 
seeking his strayed sheep, followed his dog within the church- 
doors, and found them sleeping together at the foot of the 
pillar, and found beside them a man stretched face downward, 
senseless in a swoon. 

“ It is that tali, strong, fierce brute ! We thought him made 
of iron!” said the shepherd, wondering, to his sheep-dog. 


CHAPTER XXXI. 

Meanwhile Lippo, in the Lastra, read the news-sheets, 
and walked with meek pride among the idlers at the house- 
doors at the close of the working-day. 

“ Yes, — my nephew,” he would say, with some new journal 
in his hand, out of which he could spell some fresh description 
of the successes of the Actea. “ Dear boy 1 to see how great he 
is. And to think that if I, or rather my good father-in-law, 
had not advanced the money for that little bit of land, all this 
great talent might have been buried forever, — ay, it makes one 
proud to have been the humble means. But, indeed, in his 
babyhood I foresaw the bent that he would have ; you will re- 
member, I always spared him to chant in any church they 
Bought him for. I knew it was fine practice, and what young 
life can begin holier than by using God’s gifts to praise His 
saints? It always brings a blessing. ‘ Put the child to work,’ 


SIGNA. 


313 


people said always ; but I, and Nita too, said, ‘ No ; as far as 
w^e have aught to do with him, we dedicate him, as the parents 
did the little Samuel, to the sacred offices of the Temple.’ 
Only then Bruno interfered, and would not have it, because 
the church only gives but a few pence ; as if it were pence 
brought the blessing ! But that is all bygone. I wish to bury 
all remembrance of difference. Only poor Bruno is so hard 
and harsh. 

“ Oh, yes, it is all true, — all printed here ; the Syndic of 
Genoa sent him special entreaty to be present at the first rep- 
resentation in the Carlo Felice, and all the town w'as dressed 
with flags, and strangers flocking from all parts ; it might have 
been a victory with half a million of men killed and wounded, 
for all the mighty rejoicing that there was. It does seem 
wonderful, and he such a little lad! But he does not forget 
us. No ; he ’wrote to Nita yesterday, and sent a necklace of 
pearls for our Bichetta, remembering she is sixteen years old 
to-day. Was it not pretty, and so grateful ? But he knows 
who were always his true friends, — dear boy ! Nita w'ill show 
you the pearls if you go all of you up-stairs. lie is so fond 
of us, and we of him ; only he cannot let it be seen when he 
stays here, because his first duty is, I always say, to Bruno ; 
and we know what Bruno is.” 

And Lippo would go up the street, and murmur much the 
same at other houses in the short twilight of the shortening 
days ; and his townsfolk listened, and ended in believing him. 

True, some skeptic said that the pearls were old ones of his 
mother’s that he had had reset himself on the jewelers’ bridge 
down in the city ; and some of those malignant souls that keep 
long memories for the torment of their fellow-creatures, since 
most folks like to wuite their lives in sand, remembered one 
with another a little fellow, beaten black and blue, who had 
run hungry about all day on Lippo’s errands. 

But these were in a very small minority. Baldo was a w^arm 
man, the Lastra knew, the Lastra itself being usually cold, so 
far as empty pockets go ; and Lippo had got the bit of land 
upon the hill, and had added another little bit to it, and had 
moreover such a pretty way of lending money at convenient 
moments to his neighbors, and, when obliged to ask for it 
back again at inconvenient ones, sorrowed so and wept, and 
took high interest with such reluctance or such protestation of 
o 27 


314 


SIGNA. 


it, that the Lastra could not quarrel with him, nor object to 
seeing with his eyes. 

Lippo grew daily into a power in the little place ; and 
Bruno, all the Lastra knew, — and Signa-on-the-Hill knew too, 
— had always been a dangerous, dark man, who kept his own 
counsel in churlish silence, whilst candid cheerful Lippo laid 
his heart bare as a good comrade should, and kept close 
thoughts in nothing. 

The Lastra, like the world, did not mind a little lying ; it 
was the life of gossip ; but silence it would not forgive ; silence 
was the highest sin and the biggest. 

And Baldo felt so much respect for him in consequence, 
and had so high an opinion of his judgment, that he gave his 
money for any scheme of investment or modes of purchase 
that his son-in-law proposed. 

“ Lippo had not a centime of his own,” said the shoe- 
maker to his special gossips, “ but then he knows how to plant 
a centime in the ground, so as to make it take root and 
blossom into hundreds. That is better perhaps than to be 
born with money, — to know the art of getting and turning 
about other people’s. The miller gains more by the wheat 
than the fiirmer does.” 

It could hardly be said that Baldo ever liked his son-in-law. 
But he grew to be glad of him and to believe in his good sense. 

“ Nature makes some folks false as it makes lizards wriggle,” 
said he. “ Lippo is a lizard. No day ever caught him nap- 
ping, though he looks so lazy in the sun.” 

Bruno had never known how, or, knowing, never would 
have troubled himself, to please the people round him. 

Lippo did know. 

“It is no good to make your life into a bit of solid silver fit 
for goldsmiths, and shut it up in a cupboard : you will get no 
credit,” he said to himself. “ Make it into a dish of tomatoes, 
and put plenty of garlic in ; and let every one put a finger 
into it, and lick his finger afterwards : then they will always 
speak well of you, and think they helped to cook the dish as 
well as eat it, and so will take a pride — even when your plates 
arc all cracked — in you.” 

And Lippo always ate his tomatoes in public, and so was 
much beloved, and turned his vinegar to oil. 

“ I thought he was a ne’er-do-well,” said Baldo. “ But I 


SIGNA. 


315 


was wrong. For pretty lying, nicely buttered, and going down 
like a fig in a dog’s throat, there is not his equal anywhere, — 
not anywhere ” 


CHAPTER XXXII. 

The next morning old Teresina, being a hale old body, and 
active, climbed up the slope to Giovoli, and told Palma the 
tidings. 

The girl was hoeing among the frost-bitten ground, and 
digging out caulifiowers. 

She straightened her back and listened, with her great eyes 
9pen in humid wonder, to the tale the old woman brought, — 
a tale enlarged and glorified as such narratives ever will be 
passing from mouth to mouth. 

Palma could understand nothing of it; less than any of 
them. She had never been out of the Lastra. She had never 
been in any city, nor heard any music except that at church 
and at the country merry-makings such as those at Fiastra. 
It was all obscure to her, terrible, incomprehensible. It was 
as if they had told her Signa had been made a king. 

“ Sure it was his heart’s wish, so we ought to be glad,” said 
old Teresina, when all her story was done. 

“ Yes, indeed,” said Palma ; but her head was in a whirl, 
and her throat was full. She knew, as Bruno knew, that, 
living for the world, he was dead to them, — quite dead. All 
the country was talking of him : how should he remember ? 

“ She is a stupid little mule,” thought the old woman, an- 
grily. “ She feels nothing, she sees no greatness in it all ; she 
is only good to grub among her cabbages.” 

And she went away huffed, and thinking she herself had 
been a fool to walk all the way to Giovoli to tell her news. 

Palma worked on among the hard sods, filling her hand- 
truck with cauliflowers, which her brother would wheel down 
to the market at the back of the Palace Strozzi. 

She was always hard at work, in the open air in all weathers, 
and knowing no rest; for they were poorer than ever now her 
brother grew so big; and, what with the mill-tax and the 


316 


SIOKA. 


goods-tax and the tax at the gates for every scrap of eatable 
stuffs or inch of homespun cloth, the lives of the poor are terri- 
ble in this land where all the earth runs over with plenteousness. 

Hour after hour she hoed, and dug, and uprooted, and 
packed the green heads of the vegetables one on another : all 
the while her heart was like lead, and her tears were dropping. 

“ One ought to be glad ; he would have broken his heart 
here ; one ought to be so glad,” she said to herself. 

But gladness does not come for the commanding of it, nor 
at the voice of duty. She could not feel glad ; she could only 
feel, “We shall never be anything more to him, — never any 
more.” 

Signa had been the one grace, the one poem, the one sweet 
gleam of leisure, rest, and fancy, in all the dead level of her 
laborious life. 

All the rest was so dull, so hard, so unlovely ; all the rest 
was just one constant up-hill struggle for sheer life, — one 
ceaseless rolling of the stone of poverty upward every day, to 
have it fall heavy as ever back again with every night. Her 
father was idle, her brothers were quarrelsome ; their needs 
were many, and their ways of meeting them were few ; every 
one leaned on her, everybody looked to her, everything was 
left for her to do and save : she had a nature that would have 
been happy on a very little, but she had no time to be happy ; 
no one ever thought she could want such a thing. All the 
loveliness about her always, from the blaze of sunrise over the 
hills to the mitre-flower in the path between the cabbages, she 
had no time to note : if she had a moment to rest she was so 
tired she could only sit down with closed eyes, heavily, stu- 
pidly, like an over-driven horse. 

Signa alone had sometimes made her look up and see the 
daybreak, look down and see the cyclamen ; Signa alone, with 
his smile and his song and his dreams and his fancies, had 
brought her a little glimpse of that life of the perception and 
of the imagination without which the human life differs in 
nothing from that of the blinded ass at the grinding mill. 

She clung to him quite unconsciously ; he was the sole ray 
of light in her long dark day of toil, — toil that no one thanked 
her for, because it was so simply her duty and her obligation. 

She loved him with the simplest, tenderest, most innocent 
affection ; and with infinite humility, because she so seldom 


SIONA. 


317 


could reach the height of his thought or the stature of his 
mind. He was the one beauty in her life ; he was so unlike 
all else that surrounded her ; even when she knew him wrong 
his error was more divine to her than others’ right; the hope 
of him when he was coming, the memory of him when he had 
gone, had illumined for her so many days of joyless labor ; 
when his life had gone quite out of hers she had been deso- 
late, with a desolation the more absolute because no one 
guessed, or, guessing, would have pitied it. 

And now at his victory she was not surprised. She could 
not understand it, but she had believed in him as he had be- 
lieved in himself; and, so believing, she had been sure that he 
would do the thing he wished. 

Therefore the news had found her, and had left her, so quiet, 
— so quiet : only with a weight at her heart like a stone. 

She knew, as she had known at Fiastra, his feet might re- 
turn, but his soul never ! She tried to make herself glad; she 
hated herself because she failed to rejoice. 

“ He would have broken his heart if he had not succeeded,” 
she said to herself ; and all the while she worked among the 
black earth whose chinks were filled with ice, and her feet 
were numb with cold, and her poor wisp of a woolen skirt was 
blown through and through by the north wind, and she tried 
to cheat herself and believe that she was glad. 

When the cabbages were all packed, and the rest of the 
garden-labor done, she went within a minute, and got out a 
little morsel of paper-money sewn within her mattress, and 
stood and thought. Years before, it had been given her by 
her godmother, — the only little bit of money she had ever had 
for herself ; and she had been told by her father to spend it on 
herself ; and she had saved it always from year to year, think- 
ing when she could get a little bit to add to it to buy some 
stockings and shoes for mass-days ; for she was a little ashamed 
of her bare feet in the churches. But the other little bit she 
had never got yet, all that was made by her labor being always 
wanted for the black bread for the boys’ mouths, of which, 
though she toiled ever so, there was never enough. She had 
clung to the hope of getting it always, but day by day, year 
by year, the hope drifted farther and farther away, and the 
little scroll of a bank-note was all alone in the mattress — a 
yellow tumbled scrap of a few francs in worth. 

27 * 


318 


SIGNA. 


Now she took it out and meditated a moment, and then ran 
down into the town. It was with her as if she were weighted 
with some heavy burden dragging at her heart-strings with 
every step ; yet with every step she said to herself, “ I am 
glad ; oh, dear Madonna, malce me glad !” 

She ran down to a nook in the town where there dwelt a 
man by name or nickname Chilindro, — a little old man, of 
great repute in the place as a draughtsman, and whose busi- 
ness it was, for due payment, to make those colored drawings 
which by the score adorn the vote chapels ; thank-offerings 
for great mercies, and propitiatory presents to the saints, where 
color is lavish, and perspective unknown, and miracles are 
commemorated in a primitive art that scorns all rule save that 
of the buyer’s fancy. 

Chilindro drove a good trade in his art : the peasants love 
these votive pictures, and believe in them beyond all other 
ways of pleasing heaven. Does a man escape death by fire or 
water, does he fall unharmed from roof or rick, does a child 
pass through peril unscathed, or a mother hear her son is 
saved from shipwreck, or a loose horse in mad career pass 
without trampling on a prostrate creature, — the miracle, if it 
have been wrought for pious souls, is drawn and painted, or a 
fitting print is colored ; and the Madonna, or the Saint in- 
voked, beams out from flames or waves or clouds ; and the 
record of the heavenly grace is carried up to some favored 
chapel, and hung with thousands of others, to show that there 
still is gratitude on earth, and to plead for further favors still 
from heaven. 

Chilindro did not know how to draw, but that was no mat- 
ter ; in these pictures art is nothing, faith is all things ; large 
splashes of red and blue, and the people taller than the houses, 
and the Madonna or the Saint always very prominent, — that 
is sufficient. Chilindro was a good old man, and a great gos- 
sip, and had a high repute for holiness, and had painted the 
miracles of the Signa country for thirty years and more, till 
heavenly interpositions seemed no more to him than the drop- 
ping of an apple seems to any other man. 

Palma climbed up to the attic against the south wall where, 
when times were good and accidents were many, he spent his 
days. 

He put on his spectacles, and drew his wonderful wooden men 


SIGN A. 


319 


and women, and his shipwrecks with gaping fish far bigger than 
the vessels, and his blazing hay-ricks with the Virgin sitting 
in the flames and putting them out with the mere borders of 
her robe ; for Chilindro, though he could not draw a straight 
line, had a very great reputation, and people came from far 
and near to him, even from the shores of the sea, and the 
coasts of the marshes, where the little chapels, that crown the 
heathered rocks and paths among the rosemary over the blue 
waters, have so many of these ofierings from seamen and sea- 
men’s wives, and the coral-fishers and the trawlers who draw 
their daily bread from the deep. 

Palma went up to the old man, in the dusk of the late winter 
afternoon, and drew out her piece of yellow paper. 

“ Is that enough for a good one?” she asked, with all her 
heart in her eyes. 

The old man scanned it prudently. 

“ It depends on what you want. Has your sweetheart been 
in trouble? Is that it?” 

“ No,” said Palma, too utterly absorbed in longing to do 
right, to heed the’jest or blush for it. “ Look ; I am not sure 
what it should be, but something that would please St. Cecilia. 
It is she who listens to all music, and sends beauty into it, is 
it not ?” 

“ Ay, ay,” said Chilindro, roughly, being not over-sure him- 
self, and preferring fires and shipwrecks, which were all the 
Madonna’s. “ Ay, ay ; go on : what do you want with St. 
Cecilia ? I deal with no childishness, you know ; that were 
profane.” 

Palma leaned both her hands on his table, and her heart 
was beating so, that he might have seen her rough bodice heave 
with it, only he was an old man and did not care for girls. 

“ Profane ! oh, no, no, no ! It is the very life of his life. 
It is the only thing he loves. If you would do something very 
beautiful for her that would please her very much, and show 
her I am glad, — something that would please him too, if ever 
he should see it ! I would take it up myself and pray with it, 
and so she would watch over him always. That was what I 
thought. This is all the money I have. I have saved it for 
years ; meaning to buy shoes always. If it be enough, if you 
would make it do ? then she would know how glad I try to 
be. Only I cannot — I cannot — not just at once.” 


320 


SIONA. 


Her Yoice choked in her throat ; her eyes gazed imploringly 
at the old man, as though he held the keys of heaven ; she 
had absolute faith in the power of what she strove to do ; if 
slie could have given her life-blood to get the picture, she 
would have given it willingly. 

The old man scanned her curiously. She was too thin and 
ill-clad and blown and beaten by the weather to have much 
beauty ; yet she looked almost handsome, in her brown, rough, 
simple way, as she leaned there in the dusk over his board, 
with her great braids wound about her shapely head, and her 
breast heaving, and all her soul shining in her eyes. 

“ It is that boy who has made his fame in Venice,” thought 
the old Chilindro ; but he had seen too much of men and 
women to seem to know the thing they did not wish them- 
selves to tell ; he had painted votive offerings for road-brigands 
in his earlier days, and taken their money and asked nothing 
but what they chose to say, — a still tongue, he held, being as 
gold to whosoever has the wit to keep it safely tacked behind 
his teeth. His business was to make the pictures, not to turn 
people’s memories and desires inside out ; besides, he saw the 
story of the girl in her gleaming innocent eyes. 

There were so many stories like it ; without them half the 
walls of half the votive chapels would be bare. 

He looked at her and at the paper note, then seemed to 
meditate. 

“ It is a low price ; and St. Cecilia, — that is more difficult 
than the Madonna ; she is more hard to please. Our Lady is 
everywhere. She is used to it. Stilly I will do my best, you 
being a young thing, and wishing it so much ; only your price 
is low. Because you will want laurel, and harps, and the 
trumpet of fame, and all the rest ; it is to get triumph for the 
youth and for his music that you wish ?” 

“ Yes !” said Palma, with a sigh that shuddered her with an 
infinite pain. “Yes; triumph always, what he longs for, — 
triumph eternal, that shall live longer than he lives. That is 
what he used to say. Ah, you are good to do it for so little ; 
then they will know in heaven I am glad.” 

The old Chilindro was silent. He was used to see all woes 
and joys of human emotion. He was used to mothers, sisters, 
wives, daughters, mistresses of men, who came and wept and 
laughed and prayed, and were mad with rapture at the sweet 


SIONA. 


321 


sudden deliverance from death of some life that made the sum 
of theirs. But this girl moved him ; she was so quiet, and 
yet there was such longing in her eyes. 

Nevertheless, he took her money. 

“ I will do the picture, and you may come for it this time 
to-morrow,” he said, as he raked up the little note into his 
leathern bag. “ But that you are wise I will not say. My 
dear, in failure they come back ; in success, never.” 

“ I know,” said Palma. 

“ And you still wish the picture?” 

“ I will be here for it this time to-morrow ; and you are good 
to do it.” 

Then she went. 

Chilindro did no work that night, but went and gossiped : 
on the morning he did better for her than he did for most ; 
he took a little wood-engraved head of Eaffaelle’s Cecilia, and 
left it undaubed by color, and drew round it in his own clumsy 
fashion the laurel and the bay and all immortal symbols. Pagan 
and Christian, twisted all together, and lettered under with the 
little line “ Haurietis aquas in gaudio.” 

He did not know very well why he wrote that in his flourish- 
ing gilded letters, but he thought it would serve its turn. 

Then he put it in a plain black frame, which was a free gift, 
and could not have been claimed as portion of thd^picture. 

It was much simpler than his flames and waves, his azures 
and his crimsons ; and yet, somehow, he thought he liked it 
better than them all. 

With the dusk of the day Palma came for it. To her, too, 
it seemed beautiful. She looked at it in silence, her hands 
crossed on her bosom, that he should not see how high it 
heaved. 

“ It is good of you to have done so much for me,” she said, 
gently, and then she took the picture and folded it under her 
ragged woolen shawl, and again went away, without another 
word. 

Chilindro was disappointed. 

“ I wish I had made her pay for the frame,” he thought, as 
his door shut upon her. 

Palma, with the speed of a goat, ran up into the hills ; she 
had so little time to spare ; her brothers would be home by 
nightfall, clamorous for their dish of soup. There was a little 
0 * 


322 


SIGNA. 


church high above Giovoli that she loved well, — a little old 
brown tumbling church, where Signa and Gemma had often 
played with her among the old tombs in their babyhood, and 
sat with the sheep-dog up by the altar, wondering at the little 
stone children and the broken pieces of jasper and porphyry, 
and the blazoned St. Sebastian, with the arrows in him, up in 
the narrow window, cobweb-hung. 

And sometimes Signa, with Gemma and her at his feet on 
the steps of the altar, had sung the chants he sang at matin 
and complin with the other choir-children ; and the sweet little 
flute-like voice of him had gone sighing out through the arched 
door to the sunshine, and away over the gorse and the rosemary, 
till it found the thrushes singing too, and was lost in the myrtle- 
leaves with them. 

She ran up the hill to this little church ; there were no 
thrushes now, and the rosemary and myrtle were bare, and the 
savage north wind pierced her through and through, and the 
ice in the clefts cut her feet. 

It was just open for evening service. 

There were a few scattered huts and farms, whose peasants 
would steal into it sometimes and sit down in the darkness and 
rest if they did not pray. 

She went in and threw herself down on her knees in the 
corner nearest the altar. It was there that she meant to ask 
to have the picture hung, — just there, where the old broken 
rail was still bright with the jasper, and where Signa had used 
to sit and sing. 

“ 0 dear God ! I am glad, indeed I am glad !” she said, as 
she kneeled with her hand on the stone and the little picture 
close clasped against her breast. “ Gemma is dead ; and he is 
the same as dead to me. But Gemma is safe with you and 
the angels, and he has the thing that he wished. I am glad, 
indeed I am glad. I would not have them back — oh, no ! — 
only perhaps he will see the picture once, and then he will 
know. I did what I could ; then he will know. — I am glad !” 


SIGNA. 


323 


CHAPTER XXXIIL 

The spring came in Venice. 

There were flowers all the day long everywhere, and music 
all the night ; the swallows 'and the doves were happy in the 
cloudless air ; the sweet sea-wind only blew softly enough to 
lift the hair of the wo^nen standing on the wet marble stairs 
to meet the boats of fish and of fruit. 

It was the city of Desdemona, of Stradella, of Giorgione, 
of Consuelo. Signa lived in it as in a dream ; this silence 
enfolded him like sleep, — sleep filled with the stir of birds’ 
wings, the sound of waves, the sigh of the wind in the case- 
ments full of lilies, the murmurs of amorous whispers. 

“ Am I awake ?” he would say to himself in this won- 
derful trance of slumberous delight, when all the air was full 
of his own melodies and all the people’s eyes turned after 
him. 

Signa drifted on the tide of the city’s praise and passion, 
like a rose dropped on a smooth-flowing river. He hardly 
wondered. The women’s touch and words would make him 
color like a girl, and he submitted to them with a soft timidity, 
graceful as the bending of a reed in the wind. Otherwise he 
was quite tranquil. No glory and no beauty could be quite 
so glorious or so beautiful as those of his dreams. 

To him who had dreamed of a triumph like Petrarca’s and 
a grave like Palestrina’s, who had dreamed of gates of gold 
for his Lastra, and all the nations of the earth for his singers, 
— to him nothing could* appear very startling or very great. 
True, he was only a little contadino, who still loved best his 
feet shoeless and his breast bare ; a little rustic from the vines 
and the olives, happiest to sit in the sun and eat a slice of 
bread and a handful of fruit ; but the native grace of move- 
ment and absence of self-consciousness made him as serene in 
a ducal palace as on the hill-side at home, and less moved at 
a prince’s compliment than at the shout of a boatman or a 
fruit-seller. 

He came into the fame that welcomed him as a young heir 


324 


SIGNA. 


into his heritage. It was nothing strange to him. He had 
looked for it so long. 

“ For years to long and dream and give up all hope, and 
then to wake of a sudden and find the dream all true, — that 
is to be happy indeed !” he would say to himself ; and happy 
he was with the sweet, glad, thoughtless innocence of a child. 

So happy that he never thought to turn his steps backward 
to those who watched at home on the high lonely hill in the 
light of the setting sun. 

Every day, indeed, he thought, “ To-morrow I will go.” 
But when the morrow became the present day, he still said, 
“ To-morrow !” 

He was caressed, adored, feasted, sought, done homage to 
all through the city in the months of spring. In any other 
country there might have been a coarseness in the adulation, 
a vulgarity of fashion in the universality of praise, which might 
have sated or have nauseated him ; but here, in the city that 
once heard the serenades of Stradella and held the women of 
Tiziano, it was all one simple impulse of ardor, one unstudied 
outburst of rapture, one sweet natural inspiration answering 
his own as the whole forest full of song-birds answers the first 
morning singer at sunrise ; and the days were one long festa, 
and the gondolas wafted him from palace to palace, and all 
women caressed him, from the bare-limbed fish-girl standing 
in the surf of the Lido to the jeweled lady leaning on her 
fringed cushions of silk. 

Others beside the Moon leaned down to kiss this young 
Endymion. 

He was so great a rarity to them, — so innocent, so shy, and 
yet so full of grace, with all his peasant’s simplicity and igno- 
rance, yet so far away from thei^ by that look in his eyes and 
that serious beauty of his fancies, — so utterly unlearned in all 
the usage of the world, and yet so dreamfully calm amidst 
it all, as if he were some young marble god that had been 
touched to life out from his sleep of twice a thousand years in 
Latin soil. 

For he was dreaming of another opera. 

He had the story of the Lamia in his head, — the Venus 
Lamia of Athens ; the young Greek flute-player, whose face 
is still seen on the carved amethyst in the library of the 
Louvre; she who, in Alexandria, made captive, became the 


SIGN A. 


325 


sovereign mistress of lier conqueror, and by the magic of her 
music and her beauty vanquished the victor of Ptolemy and 
changed death into love. 

He knew very little of any other learning than his own 
sweet science, but here and there the old classic stories had 
beguiled him, and the Lamia had of all others pleased him ; 
perhaps because the girl who became a goddess by force of a 
man’s passion for her had been a high-priestess of his own art, 
and by that art had changed death into love. 

In the glad spring days, the music for his Lamia came to 
him as the butterflies came in on the sea-breeze over the white 
lilies in his window. The Actea had been solemn with the 
gloom of wasted love and martyred courage ; the Lamia as she 
came to birth was radiant with all the glory of young life. 

He had read the story one day sitting on a boat’s keel on 
the Lido sands, with his feet in the water and the white sea- 
birds above his head in the sunshine. He saw his Lamia in 
the waves of light that ebbed and flowed from the shining sea 
to the shining skies ; saw her though he had never seen the 
amethyst ; saw her with her pure Grreek face and her passion- 
ate eyes and her floating veil and her fillet that marked her 
the priestess of melody, — the Lamia Aphrodite of Athens. 

And the story haunted him, and the music came with it, and 
had all the passion in it that was in all the air around him, and 
yet not in his own heart ; that women here breathed on his 
own young lips, and yet which left him so unmoved to it, as 
the sirocco goes over a lyre and leaves it mute. 

The red sullen glow of old Nile, the white serene radiance 
of Athens, the brooding darkness of Egypt, the living rings 
of the dance-chain of the Hormus, the palm-crowned virgins in 
the feasts of Hyacinthus, — all the faces and things gone from 
the earth three thousand years and more became living and 
visible to him. 

Actea had been but a shadow to him in his music ; Lamia 
lived for him and smiled. Women wanted him to love them. 
He did not. But he almost loved Lamia. 

“ Shall I see her likeness living one day ?” he thought ; and 
his face grew warm. 

It was the first time that any thought, save that of his 
music, had quickened the pulse of his heart. 

“ You do not care for us,” said a young fisher-girl, with her 
28 


326 


SIGNA. 


beautiful bronze limbs thrown down by him on the sand, and 
with her hands stroking his hair. 

Signa smiled. 

“Oh, no ! Why should I ? I see women so much lovelier 
than any of you on earth.” 

“ Where ?” said the girl of the Lido. 

“ In the sun, — in the sea, — where the swallows go, — where 
the shadows are, — anywhere, everywhere. But most beautiful 
of all when I close my eyes and play in the dark, — so softly ; 
and then they come.” 

“ Who come ?” said the girl. 

“ Ah, who !” said Signa, and he smiled, lying back on the 
sand, with his eyes on the blueness of the vault above him. 

“ Does no one love you at home ?” said the girl. 

“ Only a man,” said Signa. 

“ And the great ladies here ? The princesses ? — that one 
with the blue and gold in her gondola, who seeks you so often ?” 

“ She is — a princess. And I, I am only a peasant, you 
know. At least I was yesterday.” 

“ Then you do not love her ; though she loves you ?” 

“ No.” 

“And you do not love me ?” 

“ No, dear.” 

“ Then what is it you love ?” 

“ The things that I hear,” said Signa. “And I will love the 
Lamia when I find her.” 


CHAPTER XXXIV. 

With the spring a little house was reared on the bit of 
ground by the brook, — a little, square, low house, of the gray 
stone that is quarried above, roofed with red tiles, and entered 
by a small arched door. 

A peasant came to live in it, — a very poor laboring-man, 
who could hardly keep body and soul together ; but he was 
enough for the work of the place. The corn was green and 
promised fairly; the olives and the vines were well set for 


SIGNA. 


327 


blossom ; the reeds and the rushes grew all the thicker for 
deep winter rains and some weeks of hard frost. 

When the little grass paths between the fields were all white 
with the clusters of the sweet-smelling snow-flakes, that are 
called in this country the church-bells of the spring, there came 
up on Sundays and days of feast a handsome, pensive-looking 
man, a black-browed, stout-built woman, with a red shawl and 
gold pins in her uncovered hair, and a tribe of riotous children. 

Bruno, working in his cattle-shed, saw them. 

They were Lippo and the family of Lippo. 

They came up often, and brought a flask of wine with them, 
and rolls of bread and sweetmeats, and would sit down under 
the olives and eat and drink, and see the children race about 
and laugh very noisily, and seem the very soul and symbol of 
content ; — never quarreling by any chance whatever. 

Bruno saw them through the trees. Their words could not 
reach him, but the echo of their laughter did. 

They were friends of the cheese-seller, no doubt. The 
cheese-seller never cared to come up thither himself ; perhaps 
being so far away down in the city. 

Bruno never spoke of it ; and no one ever spoke of it to him. 

Who would, must come. He was a stranger there. 

Later on fell St. Mark’s day. 

Bruno was at work. 

Since he had lost the land and the boy, he could not keep 
the saints’ days holy ; he could not lie idle in the sun ; he 
could not endure the quiet of leisure. Unless he had always 
some toil to do, some effort to make, he felt as if he would 
turn sick or mad, or do some evil thing. In the dawn he 
would go to the first mass ; that done, he labored all the rest 
of the day till nightfall. 

He was digging up his early potatoes and shaking the earth 
off the roots ; it was a calm, bright day ; there had been 
showers ; the yellow water iris was pricking up in every run- 
let, and the little black velvet lily that the city took for her 
arms and her emblem was in the grass wherever he turned. 

He did not strike them down with his spade now. Signa 
had cared so much for flowers. 

He was working on the side of his farm that looked upward 
to the land he had lost. 

There was a belt of fir-trees between him and it, and then 


328 


SIGNA. 


a field of green barley, and then again another row of firs. 
Looking down on the black earth and the green plants of the 
potatoes, he did not see three men come through the trees and 
stand and look at him. 

He only raised his head as a voice said his name softly. 

Then he saw his brother Lippo with his youngest child 
clinging to his knees, and beside him his two friends, Momo 
the barber, and Tonino the locksmith. 

“ Bruno !” said Lippo, very softly. 

Bruno struck his spade deep down into the earth, and struck 
his heel on it, and seemed as though he had not heard. 

Lippo left the nearer belt of firs between his brother and 
himself. He stood at a little distance among the half-grown 
barley. His youngest child, a girl of three years old, with a 
face like a little St. John, and a temper like her mother’s, 
clung to him, dressed in fresh white clothes, and with a knot 
of red field-tulips in her hand. 

“ Bruno — dear Bruno,” said he, softly. “ You must see us 
often here. I thought I would come and tell you ; you might 
hear it by accident and wonder. I thought you would be 
sorry for your land to go out of the family ; once having been 
in it. So — the name used was Avellino’s, I have known him 
long and well, a most good creature ; but the money was mine, 
and the land is transferred to me, you understand? I am a 
poor man, but I have a kind father-in-law, and when one has 
so many young ones, one tries to save and better oneself, you 
understand. I thought you would be glad. And you will see 
us often here ; and if you will be neighborly and brotherly, 
dear Bruno, both Nita and I shall be most willing. The chil- 
dren might come in and cheer you, you so lonely here ” 

The self-satisfied, soft smile died ofiP his face ; the little girl 
hid hers and screamed. Yet Bruno had done nothing; he 
had only dashed his spade into the soil to stand erect there by 
itself, and stood with his eyes blazing upon Lippo’s. 

Then by the mightiest elfort of his life he controlled him- 
self, and bent over the earth and dug again, stamping his foot 
down on the iron as though he stamped a traitor’s life out 
with it. 

Lippo waited, with a vague and gentle appeal upon his 
face, and a look every now and then of gentlest wonder at his 
friends. 


SIGN A. 


329 


Bruno dug on, scattering the black ground right and left. 

“ Will you not speak, dear Bruno ?” said Lippo, mourn- 
fully. “ I thought to give you pleasure !” 

Bruno stood erect. 

“ Christ spoke to Iscariot, — and forgave him. He was the 
Son of God. I am a man. If you say one word, or tarry 
one moment, I will brain you where you stand.” 

Momo the barber and Tonino the locksmith plucked back 
at Lippo’s sleeve. 

“ Come away ; come away. He is possessed ” 

“ Envy !” murmured Lippo, with a sigh, and let himself 
be led away back through the green and bending barley. 

Bruno, leaning on his heavy spade, breathed loudly, like a 
man exhausted ; the veins of his throat swelled ; his bronzed 
face grew black \Yith the rush of blood. 

“ Christ, keep my hands from blood-guiltiness,” he muttered. 
“ I cannot ! — I cannot !” 


CHAPTEB XXXy. 

Down in the Lastra at evening, Momo the barber and To- 
nino the locksmith told the townsfolk how Bruno had threat- 
ened his brother’s life for the second time : — beware the third ! 

“We heard him ourselves. It is worse than Cain !” they 
said, in the merry little wine-shop in the Place of Arms. 
“ He squandered away his bit of land just to keep his boy in 
lewd living away in thf cities ; and good Lippo, to do the 
matter delicately, bought it back, only getting another’s name, 
not to seem too forward or hurt him too much, and thinking 
only of saving his brother’s credit, so that it should not pass 
to a stranger ; and when he breaks this to him, so prettily, — 
oh, so prettily ! — and offers him love, and good will, and the 
children to keep him company, the brute threatens only to 
brain him, — to brain him with the spade he worked with, — 
and said that the Son of God should have done the same by 
Iscariot ! It is too horrible ! Lippo is a saint, else would he 
bid the guards of the law keep their watch over Bruno. This 

28 * 


330 


SIGNA. 


we heard with our own ears. This we saw with our own 
eyes.” 

And the wine-shop echoed, “ Worse than Cain I” 


CHAPTER XXXVI. 

The spring went by, and the summer, and the tidings that 
came to the Lastra were always good. 

The boy wrote now from here, now from there, — now from 
a mountain town, where his music was playing in a summer 
theatre ; now from a lake palace, where some great prinee had 
summoned him ; now from the cities, where foreign directors 
were seeing him ; now from the sea-shore, where great ladies 
were wooing him. He said so little ; he was hidden from them 
in a golden cloud ; they could scarcely follow him even in fancy. 
But he was well, he was happy, he was triumphant, he wanted 
for nothing. They had to be content with that, and to imagine 
the rest, — as best they could. 

All the northern country was echoing with his music, up to 
the edges of the Alps, and from the one sea to the other, and 
the boy was wandering, welcomed and praised and rejoiced over 
everywhere, and with his own melodies always ringing in his 
ears, as the gorgeous genius of the “Anacreon of Genoa” had 
been three hundred years before. This was all they knew, and 
they had to be content with it. 

He was gone over the land like one of the improvisatori of 
the old times, with the sound of his “ sweet singing” in herald 
of him everywhere ; their lark had gone up against the sun ; 
they could see him no longer ; they had their work to do, the 
work that kept their eyes on the earth. 

Bruno labored on his lands, and went to and from the mar- 
kets, and toiled early and late in all weathers, and seldom spoke 
to any living thing except his dog or his oxen ; Luigi Hini 
opened and folded the black robes of the brethren, and saw 
the sick and the dead carried by, and unclosed and closed the 
church-doors, and thought that the days grew very long ; poor 


SIGN A. 


331 


merry Sandro died, quite suddenly, of a ball in bis throat, and 
Palma had to sell her hair to a barber in the town to pay for 
the grave, and to keep the boys and the roof over their heads 
as best she could, — two of them earning something small, and 
three of them nothing at all ; old Teresina fell down her wooden 
stairs and broke her leg, and could trot about no more as her 
chief pleasure had always been to do, but had to lie and look 
over the tops of her roses in the little square window, and only 
knew when the sun went down by the glow in the bit of sky 
that was all she could ever now see. The weeks and the months 
were very slow to all these, and the luxuriant summer only 
brought them heat and pain. They could not follow their 
lark, even in fancy ; he was gone so high and so far ; and 
though the summer had come for them, it was all dark and 
dust. But they were glad to think he was away against the 
sun, — glad, all of them. 

One morning Bruno went down early to the market in the 
city. It was August, and he had samples of his wheat with 
him. He worked hard ; never looking over through the belt 
of pines to the brook under the rushes ; worked as hard as he 
had done when he had worked with a great hope and goal 
before him ; partly because it was the one habit of his life, 
partly because he so had least time for thought ; also — although, 
indeed, the boy needed nothing now, and made his money for 
himself, and would have none sent to him — because, still, the 
time might come that he would want it. 

“ Di doman non si e certezza.” 

One never knew, — so Brunq said to himself, and laid by what 
he could in the old leathern pouch thrust behind a loose brick 
in the chimney-corner, that had once held the purchase-money 
of the land that he had lost. 

It was five in the morning ; a morning cold with that fresh 
alpine clear coldness which precedes at daybreak the hottest 
weather for the noon, and refreshes the thirsty earth with its 
dense dews, that are as thick as rain. On the bridge he met 
a girl slowly toiling under a great burden of linen ; she stopped 
as he passed her, and lifted her large eyes to him. She was 
very thin and very brown. 

“ Is it you, Palma?” he said to her ; he could not refuse to 
stop : poor Sandro had been a good friend and kindly to the 
boy. “ Is there anything I can do for you ? You look ill.” 


332 


SIGNA. • 


“No,” she said, timidly. “I wanted to know-' Do 

you have any news of him ever ?” 

“ All is well with him, — ^yes,” said Bruno^ “ That Dini 
sees, — ^sees in the printed papers. He has not written now, — 
not for some time. You see, it is not as if we could read 
what he writes, or write ourselves. I dare say it seems to him 
as if we forgot, since we can never answer.” 

“ He will not think we forget,” said Palma, and stood still 
with her great eyes clouded. 

“ No. But no doubt it seems as if we were all dead. It is 
to be half-dead in a yray, not to read and write, — I see that 
now. I used to think it only fit for poor pale fools in cities. 
Not a thing for a man, — unless one were a priest.” 

“ But he knows we cannot write,” said Palma, “ and Luigi 
Dini does for us, — for you, at least. Perhaps it is he himself 
who does forget?” 

“ Why not ?” said Bruno. The thought was like an arrow 
in his heart, but he would never open his lips to blame the boy. 

“ Why not ?” murmured the girl. 

Why not, indeed ? They had nothing to do but to remem- 
ber ; — he had all the world with him. 

“ Good-day,” she added, and moved to take up the bundle 
of linen, that she had rested for a moment on the parapet of 
the bridge. 

But Bruno looked at her curiously. He had seen her a 
score of times since the Lenten time when Sandro had died, 
but he had not noticed before that her hair was clipped short 
to her head like a young conscript’s. 

“ What have you done with all your braids?” he asked. 

“ I sold them.” 

“ What for?” 

“ To pay my father’s burial : — it just paid it.” 

“ I wish you had let me know. I would have paid. Poor 
child ! I never noticed it before.” 

“ That is because I tied a handkerchief on. The barber 
shaved my head quite close. Now the hair is grown just a 

“ You are a good girl. Can you manage to live — anyhow ?” 

“ Yes. We can just live. Franco and Beppo earn a little.” 

“ But you must work very hard?” 

“ I have always done that. Why not?” 


SIGN A. 


333 


“ Bu< you are a pretty girl when you have your hair. You 
must marry.” 

Palma gave a quick shudder. 

“ Oh, no.” 

“ And why not ?” 

She colored to the bronze rings of her shorn curls. 

“ My brothers will want me many years yet ; and then I 
shall be old.” 

She nodded to him, and went her way over the bridge, 
carrying the linen she had washed for the canon’s house- 
keeper on the hill. Bruno walked onward : he thought little 
of the girl, — though he had always liked her for her courage* 
and her industry, — he thought much of one of her answers : 
“ Perhaps it is he himself who does forget.” Yes ; of course 
it was he himself ; it is always the one who goes that forgets, 
always the one who is left that remembers. 

No doubt the boy forgot them: why not? He said so to 
his own heart every day all through the long months when the 
letters came so seldom and the printed papers were so full of 
Signa’s name and of Signa’s music. 

He walked on trying to fancy what his boy looked like in 
all those strange cities among all those strange faces ; trying 
to fancy how it was when the streets were thronged and the 
flowers were tossed and the theatres were besieged and the 
vivas were shouted : he had seen such nights of applause, such 
hours of homage, himself, in Carnival times in his youth, when 
Florence had found some singer or some musician in whom its 
heart delighted, and for whom its winter roses were gathered 
and its voices uplifted in one accord. 

But he could not imagine the boy among such nights as 
these, — Pippa’s son, — the little delicate lad running barefoot 
by him in the dust, and looking up through his curls to see 
if the heavens had opened to show him the singing children 
of God. 

It perplexed him. He could not grapple with it. 

All through the warm months, in the long oppressive 
(jvenings, with the thunder-clouds brooding overhead, or the 
sirocco driving the straw and dust through the gates, the old 
man had sat in the doorways and read out to all the many 
listening groups this tale and that, this history and the other, 
of the victories of Signa’s music wherever it was heard, wel- 


334 


SIGNA. 


corned in every little city of the plains and every gay town on 
the shores of lake or sea as the carnations were welcomed and 
the swallows and the nightingales ; — all through those months, 
Bruno, hearing, had come no nearer to comprehension of it, 
no nearer than the vague dull sense that the world had the 
boy and he had lost him. 

He had grown used to it, as we grow in a manner used to 
any pain, wearing it daily as the anchorite his girdle of sharp 
iron ; he was proud of it in his own silent way, as the seamen 
on the shores of Genoa were proud when they heard how the 
old world had been forced to take an empire from theirs, — 

^^nudo nocchiar; promettitar di regni;” 

proud when he went through the Lastra or down the streets 
of the city, and men who had long shunned him paused in his 
path to say, “And that young genius they talk so much of 
northward, is that indeed your boy?” and he answered, “Yes: 
it is Pippa’s son,” and went his way. Proud so. Proud of 
the boy and for him, — the little corncrake that left the fields 
to cleave his flight where eagles go. 

But he could not comprehend it, — could not realize that 
the little fellow so late singing his sequence at mass, with 
the other children, in Holy Week, with his ragged homespun 
shirt, and hungry stomach and sad eyes, could now have name 
and fame with other men, and be spoken of as they spoke in 
Florence of great Cimarosa. 

It was true, no doubt, and he was sure of it ; and working 
in his field he thought of nothing else, and said forever to 
himself, “ If he has got his desire, what does it matter for me?” 
but still it was dark to hinr; there were times when the great 
oppressive weight of it lay on him as if he had been buried 
alive, and in his grave could hear the footsteps of the boy 
going away, away, away, farther and farther, always over his 
head, but beyond his reach and beyond his call forever. 

It was a stupid feeling, no doubt, born out of ignorance and 
emotion and solitude ; but that was what he felt often, — often 
in the quiet lonely nights when there was no moon in the skies, 
and no sound on the mountains. 

This day he walked straight to the city, and did his trafiick- 
ing in the square before the heat had come, and while the 
shadows were still long on the steps between the white lions. 


SIGNA. 


335 


By noon these matters were done with by most of the men, 
for the weather was at its sultriest, and the shade of the cool 
arched granaries and wine-barns in the country more to be 
desired than the scorching pavement. He went into the place 
of Santa Maria Nodella, having a last errand there to a har- 
ness-maker. In the blinding sunshine of the unshadowed 
s(juare there was a white slender figure, a boy’s face, a gesture 
that he knew : before he could speak, Signa had thrown him- 
self upon his neck. 

“ It is I ! yes, it is I !” he cried. “ I have just come by 
the iron way that you hate so. I thought I would walk, I 
thought I might meet you, being Friday. Ah, dearest, truest, 
'» best friend ! — all that I am you have made me ; all that I may 
become will be yours !” 

Bruno looked at him speechless. Once before he had re- 
joiced so greatly, — only to find his error. He dared not now 
be glad. ^ 

He gazed at the boy, so changed and yet in so much the 
same : the solitary sunlit square went, round and round him 
like a wdiirlpool of white fire. The great stones seemed to 
heave and dance. 

“ I made sure now you had forgotten,” he muttered, and 
stood stupidly like one of his own oxen when it has been very 
long in the dark and is led out on a sudden into the full blaze 
of the noon. 

“ Forgotten ! Did you think me lower than the beasts ?” 
said Signa, and he kissed the man’s brown hands. 

“ Yes, it is true,” he added. “ Yes, I was base not to come 
back long ago. But every day. I said. To-morrow, and every 
morrow brought some change, some wonder, some great thing 
to do or hear ; and so the summer has slipped away as the 
spring did. But forget ! — oh, never, never ! What would I 
be now but for you ? — a starved and beaten thing in Lippo’s 
house.” 

Let us go in here,” said Bruno, and he mounted the steps 
of the church, with the white marble of it shining in the 
noonday sun, and went into the body of it, where the light 
was like a great rainbow stretching from one stained window 
to another. There were a few people about it, some gazing at 
the pictures, some kneeling in dark corners. 

Bruno drew him down the marble steps into the silence ot 


336 


SIGNA. 


the green cloister ; there was not a soul there ; the gate was 
left open, the guardian of the church dozed in the heat, sitting 
in the shade under the pillars. 

In the solitude where only Giotto’s faded saints and angels 
looked upon them, he drew the boy close to him and looked 
in his face. 

“ My dear, my dear ! God is good !” he muttered. “ I 
doubted it, ay, I doubted; God forgive my doubt! When 
that traitor' took the land, I could have killed him. God is 
good. My hands are clean. And the world has not taken 
you from me ; men have not made you forget. Ah, our God 
is good. Let us praise him 1” 

He leaned against one of the columns, with his face bent 
down on his arm ; his bare chest heaved, his strong nervous 
limbs trembled ; the hot sun poured in on his uncovered head, 
then silently he put his hand out and grasped Signa’s, and led 
him into the Spanish Chapel, and sank ion his knees. 

The glory of the morning streamed in from the cloister ; 
all the dead gold and the faded hues were transfigured by it ; 
the sunbeams shone on the face of Laura, the deep sweet 
colors of Bronzino’s Ccena glowed upward in the vault amidst 
the shadows ; the company' of the blessed, whom the old 
painters had gathered there, cast off the faded robes that the 
Ages had wrapped them in, and stood forth like the tender 
spirits that they were, and seemed to say, “ Nay, we, and they 
who made us, we are not dead, but only waiting.” 

It is all so simple and so foolish there ; the war-horses of 
Uccello that bear their lords to eternity as to a joust of arms ; 
the heretic dogs of Gaddo, with their tight wooden collars ; 
the beauteous Fiammetta and her lover, thronging among the 
saints ; the little house, where the Holy Ghost is sitting, with 
the purified saints listening at the door, with strings tied to 
their heads to lift them into paradise ; it is all so quaint, 
so childlike, so pathetic, so grotesque, — like a set of wooden 
figures from its Noah’s Ark that a dying child has* set out 
on its little bed, and that are so stiff and ludicrous, and 
yet which no one well can look at and be unmoved, by reason 
of the little cold hand that has found beauty in them. 

As the dying child to the wooden figures, so the dead faith 
gives to the old frescoes here something that lies too deep for 
tears ; we smile, and yet all the while we say, If only we 


STGNA. 


337 


could believe like this ; if only for us the dead could be but 
sleeping ! 

Bruno sank on his knees on the bench by the west door, 
under the beautiful Bronzino that the shadows were so covet- 
ous of, — where the word Silentio is written on the wall. 

In him the old simple blind faith lived, as it had lived in 
the hearts of the old painters, that had covered the stones 
here with their works. 

He cried straight to heaven, and he believed that heaven 
heard him. 

Holding the boy’s hand in his, and with his head thrown 
back, and his eyes meeting the full sun-rays that glanced from 
Bronzino’s Christ to him, he blessed God, who had brought 
back the body safe and the soul pure. 

Then his head sank, his forehead fell upon the back of the 
bench ; he knelt silent many moments. He spoke to his God 
alone, — or to his dead ; not even Signa heard. 

When he rose he looked calm, and his eyes shone with the 
peace of a tranquil happiness. 

“ Let us talk here a little,” he said, and they went out into 
the arcades of Giotto’s cloister, where the mountain-winds, 
and the autumn rains, and the fierce beating of the mid- 
summer suns, have stripped the saints and prophets bare. 

“ And you are a great man !” he said, with a slow soft 
smile. “ A great man 1 you — Pippa’s son — my little cow- 
herd and sheep boy ! Forgive me, dear ; it seems strange.” 

“Nay, the music in me is great; not I,” said Signa. “I 
am like the reed that the gods took to breathe through : that 
is all.” 

“ And that is pretty of you to say. But a man is known 
by his works, as a tree by her fruit; and yours are good. 
You were no dreamer, my boy, as we thought.” 

“ But if you had not sold the land !” said Signa. 

Bruno winced. 

“ Why talk of that ? What is done is done. The land 
was for you ; you were right to have it sold. I see that now, 
dear ; it was only hard at first.” 

“ But who has it? You said a traitor.” 

“ Lippo has it. He bought it secretly. Honestly as 
money goes, — but not fairly ; there is a ditference. But why 
speak of these things ? Never put back on your teeth a wal- 
p 29 


338 


SIGNA. 


nut that has the worm. Dear, you think I have suffered. 
Do not poise n your pleasure with that fancy. When the 
news came that winter night, I had more content — for you— 
than ever the land would have brought with it. I said, ‘ God 
is good.’ God is good. He has given you your heart’s de- 
sire ; and you have come back safe, and have not forgotten.” 

He was leaning against one of the columns ; the boy was 
sitting on the marble ledge where the graves are. Bruno 
looked down on him as the sun shone above his young up- 
turned face. Signa was not much changed ; his dress was all 
of white linen, but it was very simple; the sea, and the travel, 
and the hope and new glory of his life had warmed his cheek 
and invigorated his limbs ; that was all ; but there was about 
him, and upon him, that immeasurable, indescribable alteration 
which raises up the childhood that dreams into the manhood 
that has accomplished ; he was a boy still, but he was a boy 
who had fought his fight and had conquered. 

He was no longer Endymion sighing fitfully in a tormented 
sleep with vain desire ; he was the Endymion who had held 
his divine mistress in his arms, and vanquished and possessed 
her. 

“ Do not think of the land any more, ever again,” said 
Bruno. “ It was of use. That was all it could ever have 
been. It is for me now as if I had never had it. That is all. 
Dear, tell me of yourself rather : you have so much to tell.” 

It was a noble lie. 

The land was the cruelest loss of his life. Every time that 
the voice of his brother echoed up through the pines, every 
time that he saw the strange hands among the olive-boughs 
and the river rushes, the longing of vengeance possessed him 
as ardently as in the moment of Lippo’s first taunts, the sharp- 
ness of its loss was as poignant to him as in the hour when he 
had first said’to the notary, “ Sell.” But Bruno gave his gifts 
with both hands ; he did not weight them with a millstone of 
appraisement. 

Signa had so much to tell ; days, weeks,* months, could not 
have exhausted for him the story of his wanderings and his 
victories. He had lost nothing of his simple eager faith, 
nothing of his spiritual endless aspirations; only now, instead 
of dreaming of victory he had achieved it; now, instead of the 
passionate praises of genius he had its passionate joys. 


SIGNA. 


*339 


He told Ills story sitting under the arches of the noble 
cloisters, with the strong August sun making the marble warm 
like human flesh. It was the same story that Bruno had 
heard from the letters and from the printed sheets, month after 
month ; but it only now took life and color for him, it only 
now became an actual truth for him, heard from the boy’s 
liappy breathless lips, with the blue shining above the open 
court. 

Signa was a great singer in the land, as Cimarosa had been 
in his, with his gay melodies caught from the threshing-barns 
and the orange-gatherers and the coral-fishers and the vintage- 
dancers ; as the poet Chiabrera had been, with his mighty 
odes that echoed like the roll of battle ; as the improvisatore 
Bernardo had been, with his silver lute that held the Romans 
still as listening goats that circle round a shepherd’s pipe : that 
he could understand now, wonderful though it was, — now that 
the boy’s eyes shone back to his, and the boy’s own lips told 
him of cities and villas and sea-shores and mountain-palaces, 
and the tumult of towns in summer nights, and the chorus of 
strange voices under his casement singing his own songs till 
the dawn broke. 

He could understand it now ; and though it took Pippa’s 
son away from him, — quite away into a world where he him-* 
self could never tread, — yet he was proud of it, and glad, — 
bewildered, but very glad. 

“ That you should be so great, you little thing !” he mur- 
mured, and smiled, thinking of the night coming in from the 
Certosa, when he had carried the child, worn out and tired, as 
the owls cried and Signa dreamed of the Fair Angel. 

To Bruno the boy was only such a little thing, — no more 
than a girl was, or a bulrush or a willow rod in the stream. 

And half the nation was chanting his music, and the other 
half babbling of his name ! 

“ The land did not go in vain !” he thought, with a thought 
that he would not utter aloud, lest it should seem a regret or a 
reproach ; and then he rose and shook himself, with a glow of 
joy on his olive skin and a softened light beaming under his 
straight drooped eyelids. 

“ Let us go, dear. Hark ! The clock is striking. We have 
talked here three hours. I will get your baggage ; you left it 
yonder — yes ? It is not fair to keep you from the Lastra. And 


340 


STGNA, 


you are tired, too, uo doubt, and hungry. Will you sleep to- 
night on your own little hard bed, after lying under these 
great nobles’ roofs ? Do palaces smell sweeter than our hills ? 
I think they cannot.” 

Talking so, with a quickness and abundance quite rare to 
him, that came with the proud overflowing of his silent heart, 
he went and sought the boy’s small packages, and swung them 
over his shoulders, and came out again into the hot sunshine 
smiling. 

He was only a peasant, with bare feet and shirt open at his 
breast, and his face dark with many years of toil ; but there 
was nobility about him, and dignity, and freedom. 

Signa, who, though he had half forgotten, loved him, looked 
at the dark erect figure of him against the white marble and 
the blue sky, and thought the old painters might have painted 
him there in the chapter-house as the Shepherd King, the 
Re Pastore of Metastasio and of Pergolesi. 

“ Can you walk, dear ? Oh, it is too far ! I did not bring 
the cart to-day,” said Bruno. 

Signa laughed. 

“ Too far I The dear, old, dirty, ugly road that I had to 
trot down in an hour after Baldo’s beast 1 No ; I should like 
to see every stone of it ! And perhaps the people will know 
me. I think so.” 

So they went. 

“You should have a chariot, like a young prince ; and you 
walk as we do in the dust,” said Bruno, with a smile. He was 
so proud and glad. All jests seemed sweet. 

“ I love the dust. Does it not go to the Lastra?” 

And he stooped and raised a little of the dust in his hand, 
and kissed it, and blew it away, and laughed. He too was so 
happy. All trifles had their charm. 

“ Poor Palnaa asked for you this morning,” said Bruno. 

“ Palma did ? I have brought a trinket for her.” 

“A trinket! She sold her hair in Lent to pay for her 
father’s burying.” 

They went on along the road. It was dusty, noisy, un- 
lovely, as it always is ; with the people sitting out at their 
doors, and the smiths and the joiners and the coopers and the 
straw-plaiters all at work in the darksome open interiors. 

Presently one woman clapped her hands. 


SIGNA. 


341 


“ If that is not little Signa that used to live on the hill !” 

And then a blacksmith stood and stared. 

“ What, Brunone Marcillo! is that your boy?” 

And the contadiiii going by in their carts turned, and 
looked, and shouted. 

“ That is Signa ; only he looks like a lordling, all in his 
white, and with shoes on !” 

And they drove away, and said in the gates of the Lastra, — 

“ Signa is come home. He will be here in a very little ; 
we passed him on the road.” 

But the road was long to Signa ; for now one would speak, 
and then another would shake hands, and one man would fetch 
out a stoup of drink, and some girl would give him a fresh 
carnation ; and what with one thing and another, and the 
gathering groups and the recognitions and the wonder and the 
eager greetings and the reluctant farewells, his path was made 
as slow as any young conqueror’s going along laurel-hung streets 
in war-time ; and by the time they came in sight of the shields 
on the Porta Fiorentina it was nearly night, and the Ave Maria 
was sounding everywhere, and the lamps were beginning to be 
lighted. 

- In this country people gather together, like mosquitoes after 
a wisp of lighted straw, on the slenderest pretext, to follow, 
and to watch, and to chatter. 

There was a throng on his steps, laughing, shouting, chat- 
tering, not knowing very well why they went, but vaguely 
fancying that he, since the world had made a king of him, 
must have grown rich, and would by-and-by throw some gold 
to the foremost. 

There was a little crowd at his back, and out of the great 
east gate there came another crowd ; there was a white-haired 
old man at their head ; they had torches flaring red on the 
dusk; women ran with them, and children; the deep voices 
and the shrill ones rose together ; they were singing his own 
Death-Chant of the Christians. Luigi Dini, who led them, 
had taught it to them to sing as requiem in the Holy Week 
of the past Lenten season. When the peasants had driven in 
saying, “ Signa comes,” the old man had called his choristers 
together, and many young brethren of the confraternity, and 
had said to them, “ Let us meet him with his own music : 
there can be no welcome like that.” 

29 * 


342 


SJGNA. 


Signa stopped suddenly ; his heart swelled, his eyes swam ; 
he had had many a grander triumph, many a more radiant 
spectacle, many a louder-toned praise from bigger multitudes ; 
but none had moved him like that little crowd in the fitful 
glow of the torches, those fresh, rough, untrained voices singing 
his own music in the dusk and the heat of the summer night, — 
at home. 

They came out to meet him as a conqueror ; and, only such 
a little while before, he had been a little child they mocked at 
for hearing the angels singing in the clouds, when for their 
ears only the crickets chattered in the corn. 

He stood still while the torches tossed about him, and the 
strong familiar voices throbbed and thrilled upon the : then 
he threw his left arm round Bruno’s shoulders, and stretched his 
right hand out to the old man ; and he looked at the brown well- 
known faces turned upward in the shadow of the old gray gate ; 

“ Dear friends, what I am, these two have made me. The 
heavens would never have opened for me if on earth these two 
had not succored me. When I am gone, will you remember 
that?” 

In an after-time the people said to one another, “ What did 
he mean — ‘ when he was gone’ ?” 

Then, standing outside the gateway there, and stretching in 
a long line through the Lastra, while every casement and every 
doorway had its cluster of eager faces, they only flung their 
torches in the air, and shouted vivas loud enough to stir the 
soldier soul of dead Ferruccio, sleeping far away. Then, as 
the peasants had done above Fiastra before the world had heard 
of him, they lifted him on their shoulders, and, laughing and 
shouting and crying and leaping like young children in their 
pride and pleasure, they bore him away under the arch of the 
old gate, chanting the Chorus of the Christians, while from 
every dark doorway and every grated window heads were 
thrust and hands were offered, and in the dark dull town just 
going to its sleep there was one universal outcry, — 

“ It is little Signa come home !” 

Up by the shrine of the Good Counsel, Lippo’s window 
alone was dark. 

And Palma, mending the great holes in her brother’s shirts 
by the light of a solitary oil-wick while the boys were sleeping, 
knew nothing of the festival within the gates. 


SIGNA. 


343 


It was late ere they would let him go. They were poor 
people, all of them, working for their daily bread ; but if he 
could have eaten gold that night they would have found means 
to change their loaves to it, they were so proud of him, — their 
little, neglected, laughed-at waif and stray, to whom the grilli 
in the moonlit wheat had taught such sweet-toned singing. 

They forgot that they had been rough with him, that they 
had kicked him about like a little lame dog, that they had said 
all manner of cruel things to him and of the man who defended 
him ; those who do the wrong can so easily forget. But neither 
did he care to remember. 

They were the people of the Lastra to him, — the people of 
his home. 

That was enough. 

They would carry him into Sanfranco’s house ; they would 
pour forth the richest wine that the country could yield ; they 
would all touch him, all look at him, all have a word with him ; 
they would come in one on another in an endless stream, with 
a ceaseless delight ; they would pour question on question, 
wonder on wonder, and stand and look at him as if he were a 
young god come down on earth. 

“ And to think if I had not let him have that fiddle so 
cheap, the world might never have heard of him, — never !” 
said Tonino the locksmith, looking in on the edge of the crowd, 
though he did not adventure farther. 

For not only the fly on the spoke takes praise to itself for 
the speed of the wheel, but the stone that would fain have 
hindered it says, when the wheel unhindered has passed it, 
“ Lo ! see how much I helped !” 

Signa, perceiving him in the dark without, looked over at 
him and smiled. 

He did not care to remember his hurts. He was happy, 
and men all seemed to him brothers in the sunshine of God’s 
peace, like the saints in the Spanish Chapel where he had 
prayed that day. 

“ When I was a little thing,” he said to them, “ I dreamed 
of gates of gold for the Lastra here. Gates of gold I never 
can give. But, if all go well with me, I will live and die 
among you here ; and you will make my grave on the high 
hills, and you will sing what I have written when you bury 
me.” 


344 


SIGNA. 


“ Why does he talk of dying ?” they said to one another. 
“ His life is only just begun.” 

But Signa did not hear them. He was looking down on 
them with a smile, while his eyes were wet with tears. 

He had looked like that when he had been a little child, 
and they had said, “ Is it the angels he hears ? — nay, it is only 
the crickets in the corn that are humming.” 

It was late when they would let him go. Bruno had waited 
patiently, saying nothing to any soul, drawn back a little near 
the door, with the look of a great peace upon his face ; but silent, 
because too proud and with too much scorn in him to say, — 

“ You see that I spoke truth. And this is no young god, 
— this is only Pippa’s son, whom you derided.” 

The crowd went with him out by the sea-gate, and took 
leave of him till the morrow, kissing his hands and his clothes, 
and shouting and leaping around him, and bidding him be 
down at sunrise, — all the tables of the town should be spread 
for him. 

He had refused to be taken homeward. He wished to tread 
with his own feet the lonely familiar road. As the last of the 
throng left him, and Bruno and he were alone, in the moonless, 
sultry night of the hottest month of the year, the echo of the 
people’s voices followed them, still singing the chant of the 
Christians. 

“ Fame has only the span of a day, they say,” murmured the 
boy, half aloud. “ But to live in the hearts of the people, — 
that is worth something.” 

“ They love you now. Ten years ago they beat you ; ten 
years hence they will beat you again if the humor take them,” 
thought Bruno ; but he said nothing. After all, he might be 
wrong. 


CHAPTEB XXXYII. 

There was a little light in a little hut by the wayside. 
Bruno looked at it. 

“ That is where Palma lives now,” he said. “ The other 
house went with the garden. She works late to-night, — there 
are so many boys.” 


SIGNA. 


345 


“ I will give her what I have brought,” said Signa, and he 
paused and knocked at the door. “ It is I — Signa !” he cried 
aloud. 

The girl unbarred the door and flung it open. She did not 
speak, but her great eyes were alight with a Are like the leaping 
of the dawn, and she trembled from head to foot. 

“ It is I,” said Signa, slipping into her hand a little packet. 
“ Look, you must wear this to please me, — to show you I did 
not forget. I will come and see you in the morning, dear. 
Good-night !” 

He kissed her cheek, and went away. 

Palma took the parcel to the light, and opened it ; it was a 
string of carved coral beads and a cross. 

“And I am so ugly now ! oh, so ugly ! Oh, how cruel God 
is!” she cried, in a passion of anguish, and dropped her poor 
brown head on her hands ; her head that was like a boy’s. 

She had never before thought it any pain to have given her 
brave black tresses to pay for her father’s grave, — only a duty, 
so simple and natural that it was not to be thought twice about 
in any way, and never to be lamented with self-pity ; but now 
she could have wept her very soul out to have lost her sole 
treasure, to be so unlovely, so absurd, so shameful, to have given 
up her- one crown and veil of womanhood. 

“ I am so ugly 1” she moaned, sitting on the bare mud floor, 
with the pretty coral necklace in her lap. 

It was all the reward that her sacrifice brought her, — to 
know herself disfigured and discrowned when Signa’s eyes 
should fall on her with the morrow’s sun. 

She had never thought about herself, never taken any count 
whether she were lovely or unlovely, ill or well ; in her bar- 
barous life, filled to the brim with work that was never done, 
there was no time for any such speculation ; she toiled all the 
day long and half the night without joy or pause, or recom- 
pense of any sort ; honest and pure and loyal to her task by 
sheer instinct, as birds are clean, and leaves are ; never with 
any thought of herself, all her life being merged in the lives 
she served ; but now, for the first time, her heart cried out in 
sick rebellion. 

God had made her ugly, — just as Signa came. 


346 


SIGNA, 


CHAPTER XXXVIII. 

He, unwitting, went on with Bruno up the sea-road where 
his mother had stumbled to her death. There was hardly a 
breath of air, even on the hills. After a while, having reached 
a height, they paused and looked behind them. It was all a 
great sea of darkness, fragrant, but solemnly dark, like a 
mighty grave. 

“ And you love nothing but your music still ?” said Bruno, 
suddenly. “Nothing? no woman ? You would tell me ?” 

“ No woman, no !” said Signa ; and he spoke the simple 
truth. Yet in the gloom of the night his face grew warm. 
He had loved no woman yet ; but in his visions of late the 
angels that came to him had all women’s forms and women’s 
faces, as in the visions of the Paradise on Orcagna’s field of 
gold. 

As they stood and looked back into that soft impenetrable 
darkness, there came a fluttering line of light, which, undu- 
lating like a fiery snake, stole through the shadow up and up 
and up towards the clouds. 

“ What is that?” cried the boy, startled and unnerved after 
the homage and the wakeful fancies of the night. 

“ They are the torches,” said Bruno. “ A hill-burial, — that 
is all. There are so many lights; it is some young thing 
dead.” 

“ The torches came to meet me in triumph an hour ago,” 
thought Signa, and a shiver went over him, and he ceased to 
look back. 

The lights stole up the hill-side towards some lonely tomb 
among the silence of the woods, then va^ished, and all was 
dark. 


mONA. 


347 


CHAPTER XXXIX. 

W ITH the morning, Signa went down to see more quietly all 
his old friends of the Lastra. Passing, he paused by Palma’s 
hut. She was at work in her garden, gathering tomatoes off 
the bushes before her poor little dwelling. She had tied the 
red woolen handkerchief over her head again. She hardly 
looked up as she thanked him for his gift. 

“ It is too magnificent for me,” she murmured. “ You 
know I am so poor always, and so ugly now ; I have lost my 
hair.” 

“ Who would not love you more, dear, knowing why you 
lost it?” said Signa, kindly; for he knew the goodness of the 
girl, and was fond of her in his gentle way, — only she never 
could understand anything, not knowing her letters even, and 
being always at work like a little windlass that everybody’s 
hand turns. 

But Palma shook her head. 

She did not know anything indeed, but the instinct of her 
sex moved in her and made her feel that no glory of a golden 
deed is so great a nimbus to a woman as the rays of a physical 
beauty. 

“ Indeed, you are never ugly, Palma,” said Signa, to console 
her. “ Dear, you have straight features, and such noble eyes; 
you cannot be ugly, ever. And for the hair, that will very soon 
grow, and you must wear the necklace on feast-days when I am 
gone, to show that you remember me.” 

Remember ! Palma thought of the St. Cecilia hung up in 
the church above on the hill. She had meant to tell him of 
it; she had dreamt always of leading him up there hand in 
hand, as they had used to go when they were children, and 
making him sit on the altar-steps where the jasper was, while 
she told him what she had done ; but she was silent about it 
now that he was here. Someway she felt almost ashamed 
of it. 

He had made his own fame ; he had won his own victory ; 
he did not want her help or St. Cecilia’s. Perhaps he would 


848 


SIGNA, 


only smile, she thought. She was not sure of the great use of 
the picture ; all in a moment she had lost her faith in it. 

He looked so full of grace, smiling there in the sunshine. 

She glanced up at him, feeling as if there were whole worlds 
of distance between him and her. She could not have done 
him any good with her prayers up there in the dark ; she could 
not have been wanted. She wo^d have liked to tell him, but 
she felt ashamed. 

“ You work so hard, Palma,” he said, leaning over the low 
stone wall. 

“ Yes ; but I have always done that. It is not new.” 

“ But the boys must help you, now ?” 

“ A little ; but they eat more than they earn.” 

“ Did your father suffer much, dying?” 

“ A great deal ; it only lasted a day. He could not speak, 
but I think he thought of Gemma : he kept looking at that 
little Jesus in wax that used to be so like her. He has seen 
her now — in heaven.” 

“ You are always sure she is dead ?” 

“ Oh, yes ! She would not have forgotten us so long as 
this, if she were living.” 

Signa was silent. He knew that to those who go, forget- 
fulness is easy ; to those who stay, impossible. 

“ I never think she is dead,” he said, at last. 

“ Why?” 

“ Because she was so full of life ; so sturdy, so mirthful ; 
always in mischief too, and doing so well for herself : things 
like that do not die.” 

“ Everything dies if God wills it,” said Palma. “ For me, 
I am sure she would not have forgotten if she were living. 
Sometimes I pray to her to make me a little sign from heaven, 
but she never does.” 

“ She was like a cherub in heaven to look at,” said Signa, 
who never had quite ceased to mourn his lost playmate or to 
reproach himself with her fate. After his music, he had most 
loved Gemma. 

“ Yes,” said Palma, and stooped down her head over her 
hoeing at the weeds ; she felt so ugly, with her short, ruffled, 
foolish, clipped curls, that made her feel like a shaven dog. 
She never had thought of her face before, — of what it pos- 
sessed or of what it lacked ; but that morning, rising, she had 


SIGN A. 


349 


looked at herself in the little square hit of mirror over the 
flour-bin, and had thought she was lean and brown and 
frightful. 

“ I do not believe she is dead,” said Signa, again. “ Some- 
times, in the strange cities, I look about in the women’s faces 
to see if there may be one that might be hers. She would 
not alter. I should know her.” 

“ You never will see her. She is dead,” said Palma, with 
the obstinacy that is always in the peasant as in the mule. 

She worked on among her tomatoes, gathering the bright 
scarlet balls into a skip. 

She could not tell him about her St. Cecilia. He would 
only talk of Gemma all the while, if they were to go up there 
among the thrushes and the rosemary ; besides, the change 
that was in him she felt more acutely than even Bruno had 
done. This beautiful young Endymion, whom the moon had 
kissed, could have wanted no help of hers. Her poor little 
picture seemed to her so foolish, so humble, so small ; the 
grace and greatness of his fame could not have grown out of 
her prayers in that little dark nook. All the year she had 
thought that it had, and had poured out all her heart in them. 
But now that she saw him, her hope seemed to her as stupid 
a thing as if a brown ant creeping by with a grain of corn 
had thought it filled the granaries of the world. 

She was ashamed of her little picture that she had spent 
all she possessed to hang up there by the altar-rail, with the 
ruby light of the stained glass upon it whenever the sun went 
west. She did not dare to ask him to go up to the hill with 
her and see it. 

“ I did what I could ; but then he did not want anything 
done,” she thought. 

“ She is dull and morose ; she works too hard, poor girl,” 
thought he ; and he moved away. “ Good-day, dear, for a 
little ; I will see you before I go.” 

“ Go ! — you go again, then ?” 

“ Ah, yes ! In a very little. It will he the autumn season 
soon. I go whenever the ‘ Actea’ is played.” 

Palma looked up at him, straight in his face. 

“ And you are quite happy ?” 

“ Quite.” 

“ And you are really great?” 

30 


350 


SIGNA, 


“ Men say so. I do not know. I will be greater if I live.” 

“ And Bruno lonelier.” 

She wished the words, when they were said, unsaid. Signa’s 
face clouded a moment. 

“ That is not my fault,” he said, slowly. “ And no, — per- 
haps he will not be : when I am all that I dream of, and when 
I have gold in both hands, I will come back and live here on 
the hills, that I promise ; and I will build a palace of marble 
that shall look east and west ; and all the hungry shall be fed 
there, and all the footsore rest. And then, when there are any 
boys quite desolate, as I was, and dreaming beautiful things, 
as I did, and wanting help, and not knowing where to turn, 
then they will all come to me ; and I will teach them, and we 
will sing together, and they shall be happy, and we will give 
our lives for the world ; and men will love us, and, through 
us, love Grod ; it will be like the ‘ Angeli’ of San Marco dwell- 
ing together with music, with the roses round them, and the 
sky above !” 

He stopped ; the cloud had cleared from his face ; it was 
shining with a light that was sweeter than the sun’s. 

He was only a boy still ; and the world had not dimmed his 
dreams with its breath. 

Of all the innocent things that die, the impossible dreams 
of the poet are the things that die with most pain, and, per- 
haps, with most loss to humanity. Those who are happy die 
before their dreams. This is what the old Greek saying meant. 

The world had not yet driven the sweet fair follies from 
Signa’s head, nor had it yet made him selfish. If he had 
lived in the age when Timander could arrest by his melodies 
the tide of revolution, or when the harp of the Persian could 
save Bagdad from the sword and flame of Murad, all might 
have been well with him. But the time is gone by when 
music or any other art was a king. All genius now is, at its 
best, but a servitor, — well or ill fed. 

Palma listened, looking up at that bright strange light upon 
his face ; not understanding at all with her mind, but wholly 
with her heart. The frozen pain in her melted. 

She put her full basket back into the house. 

“ Will you come with me a moment ?” 

“ Where ?” 

“ To the old church up yonder.” 


SIGN A. 


351 


“ Yes, dear.” 

She called to her little brother to mind the house, and took 
Signa up the narrow winding paths, just trodden down in the 
grass by a few rare footsteps going up among the vines, and 
then among the olives, and then where the land grew wilder 
among the gorse. The vines were hung with grapes that 
touched them as they went ; the wild peaches fell yellow at 
their feet ; the blue radish-flower was in the grass like gleams 
of the sky reflected on the dew ; big oxen, muzzled and belled, 
looked at them through the leaves. 

“ It is so beautiful !” said Signa, mounting higher and higher 
into the tangle of green and the net-work of sunbeams. 

“ Yes,” said Palma. But she did not know it. She had 
not time. Among all its sad losses, poverty has none that beg- 
gars it more than its loss of perception. 

They reached the old church, brown and solitary, with a few 
cypresses near it, and round it the sheep grazing ; it had once 
been the chapel of a great villa, of which there was nothing 
now left but roofless arches and a wall where the rains of five 
hundred winters had not quite washed away the frescoes. 

She took him in, and led him up to the pillar by the altar 
where the little picture hung. 

“ I bought it ; I put it there,” she said, timidly. “ Perhaps 
it has done nothing, you know ; perhaps you do not want it ; 
but at least it could do no harm, and I have come and prayed 
here every little bit of time I had to spare. I am sure the 
saints love you, — without that or anything, — but it was all I 
could do. And when you were so far away ” 

Signa looked up at the column and understood it all. He 
stooped and kissed her, touched to the quick. 

“ Ah, dear ! how good to think of me ! You bought it, — 
you, who toil so hard ? Oh, Palma ! I will try and find 
Gemma for you ; — I shall find her ; — something tells me so.” 

Palma sat down on the lowest altar-step ; she did not an- 
swer. If he had looked at her face he would have seen that 
it was very pale under the brown that the sun had scorched 
on it. But he did not look ; he was looking up at the painted 
Sebastian against the roof, and thinking how bitterly Gemma 
had cried one day because he could not reach down the saint’s 
golden arrows for her. 

The sheep-bells tinkled; the smell of the rosemary was 


352 


SIGNA. 


sweet on the air ; a bird sang, sitting on the old tattered mass- 
book. 

“ Gemma is in heaven,” said Palma, and sat still and pale 
in the morning light. 

Gemma ! — who had always been so much happier than she. 

“ Perhaps I shall find her somewhere in the great world,” 
said Signa, softly. “ And she will have suffered, perhaps, and 
sorrow have softened her and ennobled her, — it does, they say, 
— and made her soul as beautiful as her little body was. 
Think of that, Palma ! and then I would bring her home to 
the palace that I mean to build, and make her happy, so 
happy ; and she would be in all my music, just as the sun is in 
all the flowers. Think of that, Palma ! Pray that it may come 
true. It would be like a story out of the ‘ Legend of Gold.’ ” 

Palma was still very pale. 

“You will see her in heaven,” she said. “ She was drowned 
in that sea, that I am sure.” 

But Signa shook his head. 

“ She is alive ; that I am sure.” 


CHAPTEB XL. 

Signa went down into the Lastra and sat a while with 
Teresina in the room over the sea-gate, and spoke with old 
friends, — of whom he found many, since they are flowers that 
grow fast in the soil of success, — and spent some hours in the 
sacristy, turning over, with curious emotion, the yellow scores 
and crabbed manuscripts which had once been written to him 
in an unknown tongue. 

Then he passed down into the city. 

He knew so little of it, scarcely more than if he had been 
a stranger. Bruno had held him back from it always. 

He strayed into the galleries, quiet and deserted in the 
strong August heats, and saw the face of the Samian Sibyl 
and the beauty of the Venus of Titian. 

As he wandered down the corridor which holds the portraits 
of the artists painted by themselves, he paused before one which 


SJGNA. 


353 


seemed to him, in a way, familiar. It was the head of a man 
still young, — a head that had grace and power in it, but also 
a promise of levity and caprice. It was roughly painted in 
black and white. 

“ Whose head is that?” he asked the custodian dozing in 
the sun. 

“ A living painter’s, — one Istriel.” 

“ Of what country ?” 

“ France. He is a great man there. He did that for us 
by order of the king.” 

“ I have seen him somewhere. Where does he live ?” said 
Signa, and mused a little while, and then remembered the 
morning of the Feast of the Transfiguration, and the gift of 
the fair Oesu. 

“ He lives in France, I suppose,” answered the other. 
“ But I think he is a great deal in Rome. I think he works 
there a great deal.” 

“ What kind of things does he paint ?” 

“ Women, for the most part, I believe. There is a picture 
they talk very often of just now ; you can see a copy of it in 
the town : it is very fine, — a woman.” 

“ A portrait?” 

“ Oh, no ; just a woman dancing.’’ 

“ I will see it,” said Signa, and he went where the man 
directed him, for the sake of those two gold coins that had 
bought his Rusignuolo. 

“Who knows?” he thought; “without those forty francs 
I might never have known more of music than to thrum on a 
lute to the sheep.” 

Who could tell ? All Bruno’s labor of eighteen years might 
have been of less use than two gold pieces tossed by a stranger. 

He found the place where the copy of the great picture 
could be seen, — a copy made by the painter’s pupils, and 
shown for a little while by his permission, the original being 
in Paris. It was a picture of which all the world had talked 
two years before, while Signa was buried under the dust of 
study and the darkness of poverty and the disbelief of men. 

The copy was alone in a small cabinet, hung with red and 
lighted from the top ; it was a full-length form of a woman 
dancing, — only that, — on a sombre background of brown 
shadow. 


30 * 


354 


SIQNA. 


Was it so beautiful ? 

He did not know. But be shaded his eyes as if from too 
much sun. It dazzled him. The figure stood out from the 
darkness like a living thing ; all the light was concentrated 
on the exquisite fairness and warmth of the supple body, on 
the head turned over the shoulder, on the upraised arms toss- 
ing castanets above, on the knot of pomegranate buds above 
the ear, on the rounded limbs, lithe as reeds and white as 
snow, on the transparent scarf of scarlet, touched with gold, 
which was the only drapery. The figure bent a little back- 
ward, showing every curve and grace of it: the face was 
beautiful. 

It was called, with the arrogance of a genius that knew its 
hold upon the world, “ A Sister for the Seven Dancers of 
Herculaneum.” 

Signa stood oefore it blinded, stunned, confused. 

No living woman had ever moved him as this dancer did. 
He gazed and gazed till, as the passion of the Spanish love- 
song says, “ his heart’s blood was drawn from him through 
his eyes.” 

And yet the picture hurt him. 

Hurt him by the taint that there was upon its loveliness ; 
as there is in that of the Venus Calypica of Naples. 

An old man, looking at the picture at the same time, spoke 
of it. 

“ Yes ; it is a beautiful study,” the stranger said. “ I have 
seen the original. This is a fine copy. The artist has touched 
it here and there himself.” 

“ It is not a portrait?” said Signa, timidly. He could not 
bear to speak of the picture, and yet he wanted to know more 
of it. 

“ Oh, yes, it is a portrait. Only you see he has painted it 
in the old Greek manner, — the feet off the ground, no sign 
of earth, indeed, — the figure floating, as if she flew. Yes, it 
is drawn from life. A girl — a woman — whom they call In- 
nocence, in Paris.” 

“ Innocence ! And painted there 

The old man smiled. 

“ Nay, Vitellius called his bear so. The wild beast shamed 
it less than does the woman, perhaps.” 

The next morning he said to Bruno, “ I have found the 


SIGNA 


355 


name of the man who gave me that money in the Lastra. It 
is Istriel. You remember my losing the paper in the rushes 
as I ran.” 

“What do you want with any man now?” said Bruno, 
jealously ; “ or with any man’s help ?” 

“ Nothing, indeed ; but I should like to see him.” 

“ I cannot see w^hy you should think about him.” 

“ Perhaps I never should have got beyond my little lute 
but for him.” 

Bruno gave an impatient gesture. 

“We are what we are,” he said, with rough fatalism. “ It 
is no chance wind that blows the notes into the nightingale’s 
throat, and the screech into the owl’s : all that is settled be- 
forehand.” 

Signa was silent. He did not say his thought aloud, which 
was, — 

“ I wish to meet this painter, because I want to know 
where he found her, or if he only fancied her, — that ‘ Sister 
of the Seven Dancers.’ ” 

He said, instead, “ Come down into the city and see a pic- 
ture of his.” 

“ I cannot to-day,” said Bruno, “ because there is so much 
to do. Watering alone takes six hours in this dry weather; 
but to-morrow, perhaps, I can.” 

On the morrow he went. He did not know anything about 
any of the arts, but he was at home among them ; they were 
familiar things to him : it is so with all his country-folk. 

He stood and looked at it for some time ; then he laughed 
a little. 

“ Yes ; it is a beautiful — wanton.” 

He had hit the blot on it. 

Signa sighed unconsciously and restlessly. The picture be- 
guiled him, bewitched him, and yet hurt him. 

Bruno said, “ Do not look at it too long ; it will get into 
you — like marsh fever,” and took him away. 

When they were in the sun again in the streets, he added, — 

“ If your baby Gemma were alive, that is just what she ’ 
would be like.” 

“ No ! never !” said Signa, indignantly ; he did believe she 
was living, but he looked for her always among the innoc^^nt 
maiden faces at mass in the churches. 


356 


SIGNA, 


Bruno laughed a grim laugh. 

“ Let us hope she is dead,” he said. ‘‘ Only the devil uever 
cuts his very best flowers down early.” 

Signa did not answer. 

“ Your painter must be bred to spread the plague,” said 
Bruno. 

Signa did not ask him what he meant. 

He went and found Palma. 

“ You do pray for Gemma’s soul ?” he said to her. 

“ Always,” said Palma. 

“ Well, pray more, dear. Perhaps she needs it, — who 
knows ?” 

“ Oh, no; she is in heaven,” said Palma. “ Such a child, 
— and Christ so good.” 

“ Well, never mind. Pray always.” 

“ That is all he thinks I am of use for, to pray for Gemma’s 
soul,” thought Palma. But she reproached herself for the 
thought, as mean and base. 

She had never ceased to love Gemma and mourn her, — only 
she wished he would not talk of her, not so very much. 

Signa wandered about the woods alone, and saw always 
before him, in the golden fires of the summer day. The Sister 
of the Seven Dancers. 

She banished the sweet veiled face of Lamia. 

One day Lippo met him in the pine-woods, no one being near. 

“ Dear nephew,” said Lippo, softly, “ we cannot meet. Bruno 
is implacable. He will never forgive what he thinks an injury. 
See here : I knew his little piece of land had to be sold to give 
your work a trial and a chance of favor, i e,aid to myself, I 
have a kind father-in-law and good friends, shall I offer to lend 
the money? But then I bethought me, Bruno would only 
answer with a blow. So when it was quite sure the land must 
go, I said to an honest soul in the city whom I could trust, 
‘ Go, buy it in your own name, and make it over to me ; so 
the thing shall not wound my brother, and yet the piece of 
ground not go away from the family.’ So said, so done. 
Dear, I only hold the land in trust. I tried to explain to 
Bruno, but his head was full of traitors and of wrath ; I 
could make no way with him. He would have brained me 
with his spade. But this I wish to say to you : my children 
are dear to me, but justice is dearer still. If ever you wish 


SIGNA. 


357 


the land back again, I will sign it over to you, — almost as a 
gift : I wogld say quite so, but, when one has so many mouths 
to feed, one is not altogether the master of one’s purse. Dear, 
be quite sure of this : I bought it, hoping to please Bruno, 
— never to spuo and vex him, as he thinks. Christ knows 
there is no venom in my heart. The other night, when you 
had such a welcome, I was proud and glad ; I should have 
come foremost out among them, only Bruno is so violent, and 
I feared it might look like time-serving. But, believe me, no 
one is prouder than I am, and Nita : she says fifty times if 
once, ‘ To think he is so great, — the little drowned baby that 
sucked with Toto !’ Dear, you have been made to think ill 
of us. It is a pity. And in your grand famous ways in the 
future years you will not want us ; that is true. Still, be sure 
our prayers go with you ; and though we are only poor folks, 
toiling hardly in a little village, we shall not shame you, for 
we are Christians and we pay our way ; and if you ever should 
desire back that little bit of land, — well, I look on it still as 
yours, and I never let the interests of my children bar the road 
of justice. No, that were to serve them with very narrow sight 
'and worldly selfishness. Bruno has misjudged me always. Well, 
the saints bore all evil and were patient. So must we. Dear, 
farewell. If ever you dare brave my brother’s wrath, and will 
look in on us, you will find frank welcome. But perhaps I am 
not right to ask it. Your duty to Bruno before all things. 
Yes; to you he has been good. Farewell.” 

And Lippo went away quite softly through the pines. 

Signa was moved. True, they had been unkind to him ; 
but such wrongs fade fast in generous natures, and where an 
impersonal passion reigns, personal injuries seem slight and are 
soon forgotten. 

Perhaps Bruno had been harsh and too swift in his ire, he 
thought respectfully. Bruno’s error was too great haste of 
temper and strength of hatred ; that all the country knew. 

“ I wish they could be reconciled,” thought the boy, and 
lingered on his way home wondering if there were any means 
to do it. 

He hinted at forgiveness that night to Bruno. 

Bruno set his heel down with a force that jarred the house. 

“ I do forgive as much as can be asked of any man : I let 
him be.” 


358 


SIGNA. 


Meanwhile Lippo went homeward to his attics hy Our Lady 
of Good Counsel, pondering whether he could not prevail on 
Baldo to help him to acquire another acre or two of ground, 
quite near on the same hill, which rumor said would soon be 
in the market. Baldo had grown to have strong faith in the 
prudence and wisdom of his son-in-law. 

“You will let the boy have back the land at what you gave 
for it !” screamed Nita, when her husband told her of the 
things that he had said ; for she was a rough, impetuous 
woman, of fierce temper, and could never see an inch where he 
saw full a mile. 

Lippo smiled, his gentle, pensive smile. 

“Nay, dear; that is a question for the future. The chil- 
dren’s interests must not be forgotten ; that were not just to 
them ; and land rises in value every day, and money gets more 
scarce.” And he sauntered out into the warm, star-lighted 
streets. 

“ I have seen the dear lad,” he said to Momo and Tonino 
and his other gossips. “ I met him quite by chance. So tall 
as he is, and so graceful, and so like a young prince, one would 
not know him. His heart is full of love for us. He cannot 
show it. No. He would come to us ; but I said to him, — I 
say always, — ‘ Your duty, before all else, to Bruno.’ I must 
say it, knowing what I know. His duty is to him, — as Toto’s 
duty is to me. Oh, yes, he is a noble lad, — spoiled in much, 
— yes, but of a good heart. Bruno has not done ill in letting 
him have the land’s money for his opera ; I know it has paid 
Bruno back thrice over. Bruno has a clear head and a keen 
eye. They know that in the Square of the Signoria. Poor 
boy ! Well, — I say poor, — perhaps stupidly, but it does seem 
so. Parted from us all, and ruled by Bruno ; and, like all 
people that have genius, a baby, a simpleton, a mere piece of 
w^ax in worldly matters. All the country is ringing of him. 
It is a great thing to think : unless we had let him go to the 
church functions and learn the plain-song and be so much with 
the sacristan in the organ-lpft, he might never have known all 
that there is in him ; he might have been a little shepherd, 
barefoot on the hills, — yes, still. Throw your bread upon the 
waters, — ay ; — perhaps come back to your own mouth it will 
not ; but you will be blessed by it, someway. The dear boy 5 
— no doubt in his great world he will forget us all : why not ? 


SIGN A. 


359 


We are peasants, when all is said ; and he will go to palaces. 
But then the good that we have done to him keeps with us like 
a cypress bough that never withers and thut drives the evil 
spirits far away. Dear boy ! — to think he is so great ! — and 
will be rich too ; if, at least, his gold be left him and his 
careei' well managed. That is the only thing I fear. Bruno 
loves him — oh, surely — in his way. But then Bruno loves 
money too.” 

And Lippo sighed, and piled the dominoes in a little heap 
absently, and with a sad, nervous gesture, — thinking. The 
gossips shook their heads. 

Lippo was so just a man : that all the town knew. Of such 
men is the kingdom of heaven. To be sure, his window had 
been dark that night when all the Lastra was rejoicing ; but 
that had only been good feeling in him. He had not liked to 
seem to claim the boy’s grateful remembrance — when there 
was such great triumph too. 

“ We may remind those who fail, of us,” said Lippo, with a 
gentle smile. “ But we must be forgotten by those who suc- 
ceed, — if they choose it shall be so.” 

“ You are so good,” said his neighbors, and began to mutter 
to one another that Bruno, when he had sent the boy to the 
great schools and sold the land for him, had only been sharper 
of sight and more prudent of forecast than ever, — yes. 

And the Lastra was well content to think that, when it had 
welcomed so loudly the young hero of the Actea, it had left 
Bruno standing aloof, and had not noticed him, — not even 
when Signa bade them. 

The lad stayed on till vintage came again and passed ; cor- 
recting and perfecting his new music of the Lamia in the fresh 
hill air, in the sweet smell of the fruit; and now and then 
went down into the city, and stood and gazed at the dancer 
of Istriel, and drank in the impure sorcery of her, without 
knowing it. 

“ Your painter is like the sun ; he breeds rottenness from 
beauty,” said Bruno, who knew the force of the flesh and the 
devil, as he called it, and felt a sort of sullen scorn of this 
strange painter who spent his strength giving enduring shape 
to the fleeting graces of wantons. To Bruno it seemed a poor 
thing to fill a man’s life. Women were women, — to be toyed 
with if you would ; but to pass your life painting in their owi- 


360 


SIGNA. 


likeness their wiles of a moment and their postures of pleasure, 
— that seemed to him poor pursuit enough. This painter was 
only a name to him, a vague shadow ; but he felt a fierce wrath 
against him. But for the coins that had bought the Rusig- 
nuolo, — who could tell ? — Signa might have dwelt contented 
in the peaceful husbandry of the hills. 

For the iron was always in his soul. He was proud of his 
boy, and loved him, and knew that now Signa could never be 
other than he was, and so ceased to chafe at the unchangeable, 
and tried to make the best of an undesired destiny. But, like 
Palma, it was all in vain that he brought his thank-offering, 
that he prayed to his gods, that he said a thousand times, “ I 
am glad.” 

In his heart there was no gladness. 

In his heart he lamented still and rebelled. 

With the last day of vintage Signa spent his last hours on 
the hills. 

The Actea was being given at the theatre of Como, and he 
had to go thither, and thence to Milan, where its music was 
yet unknown. 

He had a sort of longing to buy that dancer of Istriel, and 
take her with him, and look at her always; but it was impos- 
sible : despite his own new-born fame and Lippo’s fables, he 
was poor; he made some money, but no more than was needed 
for his costs of travel and his simple ways of living and the 
gifts that he loved to throw broadcast. He was famous, indeed ; 
but he was only a boy, and had to deal with a shrewd world, 
and it cheated him. The world, like Lacedaemon, is fond of 
hounding into silence and exile its Timotheuses who dare to 
add new chords to its lyre of song ; but it is unwise to do it, 
for its Timotheuses are so intent on stringing the lyre anew, 
and hearing the full, sweet sound of their fresh creation, that 
the world may empty their pockets unfelt, as it will, and un- 
chidden. Its Timotheuses are its golden geese : it should be 
content to pluck them ; but it is not often so : seldom is it sat- 
isfied with doing less than what kills them. 

It was very early in the morning. 

There had been heavy rains at night, and there was, when 
the sun rose, everywhere, that white fog of the Valdarno 
country which is like a silvery cloud hanging over all the earth. 
It spreads everywhere and blends together laud and sky ; but 


SIGN A. 


361 


it has breaks of exquisite transparencies, through which the 
gold of the sunbeams shines, and the rose of the dawn blushes, 
and the summits of the hills gleam here and there, with a 
white monastery or a mountain belfry or a cluster of cypresses 
seen through it, hung in the air, as it were, and framed like 
pictures in the silvery mist. 

It is no noxious steam rising from the rivers and the rains ; 
no gray and oppressive obliteration of the face of the world, 
like the fogs of the North ; no weight on the lungs and blind- 
ness to the eyes ; no burden of leaden damp lying heavy on the 
soil and on spirit ; no wall built up between the sun and men ; 
but a fog that is as beautiful as the full moonlight is, — nay, 
more beautiful, for it has beams of warmth, glories of color, 
glimpses of landscape such as the moon would coldly kill ; 
and the bells ring, and the sheep bleat, and the birds sing un- 
derneath its shadow ; and the sun-rays come through it. darted 
like , angels’ spears : and it has in it all the promise of the 
morning, and all the sounds of the waking day. 

Bruno’s dwelling was lifted out of it, but it spread every- 
where beneath ; and the tops of the highest hills seemed to 
ride on it like ships upon a sea. Signa paused and looked 
over the vast scene as he and Bruno came out into the air. 
He had , to leave at eight of the morning for the northern lakes, 
trusting himself to that iron way and horse of fire which 
Bruno had never ceased to hate and to mistrust, though night 
and day for so many years he had heard the steam beast 
thunder dully through his valley, winding as the river wound. 

They came out of the house after their meal of bread, 
which was all they broke their fast with, and stopped by 
mutual impulse under the old mulberry-tree by the porch. 

Bruno had said nothing to dissuade him from departure. 
He had grown to see the necessity of their lives being per- 
petually asunder. 

Signa could only come to kim now and then, — that he saw ; 
and the times of his coming must grow rarer and rarer, and 
the links of union between them fewer and fewer, — that he 
saw too. He never complained. He hardly regretted. He 
had known that it would be so, when he had broken the Bu- 
signuolo. It was a dull, ceaseless, unchanging pain to him, 
but he said nothing. What was done was done. 

This young singer — this young hero — this young crowned 
Q 31 


362 


SIGNA. 


dreamor of dreams, could by no miracle be brought back and 
be made into a peasant lad, and contented with a laborer’s lot. 

If he ever returned to live here, it would only be because 
the world drove him back with a broken heart ; therefore 
Bruno said, in his dark corner in the church, to the unknown 
powers that he worshiped, “ Let him never be brought back, — 
never.” 

The world had his boy. Since the world would only part 
with him if it flung him bruised and ruined away, let the 
world keep him. 

“ After all, it does not matter for me,” said Bruno, and 
taught himself to think so. 

Only a vague fear, a shapeless anxiety, haunted him always. 
He knew too little of any life beyond that of his own country- 
side to be able to go with Signa, even in fancy, into these 
strange new lines of his fate. He was too ignorant, and mis- 
trusted himself too much, to be able to tell the lad what it 
was that he dreaded. But in his heart he was full of trouble. 

“ All is well enough with him now,” he thought. “ But 
when the woman comes?” 

For Bruno thought that the great world, since it was made 
up of men and women, must have the same fatality in it as 
the life he knew. 

The woman makes or mars the man ; the man the woman. 
Mythology had no need of the fates. 

There is only one, — the winged blind god that came by 
night to Psyche. 

So much Bruno knew. 

A weight of longing and of warning was upon his heart. 
But he stood silent in the arched way of his house. 

The boy seemed now so much wiser than he ; had seen so 
many cities and men ; had sown the seeds of his young brain 
and made already harvest ; was great, though so young. What 
could he say himself? — a man who knew nothing except to 
drop the wheat-grain into the earth, and wait for sun and storm 
to make it multiply ? 

What came in his mind to say were a million confused 
things ; he did not know how to sort them and shape them 
ill to speech. 

At last he did say, with the heavy gloom of parting on 
him, — 


SIGNA, 


363 


“ Woman is god or devil to man, as he to her. Dear, when 
you love a woman, tell me. Will you tell me that?” 

Sign a smiled musingly. 

“ Oh, yes I I love my Actea and my Lamia. They are the 
real and living women to me. The rest are shadows.” 

“ That will not last,” said Bruno, curtly. “ Your Actea 
and your Lamia will be the shadows soon.” 

Signa shook his head. 

“ Not to me. Mozart loved his wife ; but it was not of his 
wife he thought when he was dying. It was of his requiem.” 

“ You speak like a child,” said Bruno ; and they were 
silent. 

It was of no use speaking ; they did not understand each 
other. The boy knew the powers of art, of which the man 
was insensible. The man knew the powers of passion, of 
which the boy as yet was ignorant. 

Bruno saw in the future a fate that wrestled with him for 
the soul of Pippa’s son. It wore to him the likeness of that 
Sister of the Seven Dancers of the city of ashes. 

To him she was a symbol : she haunted him ; he hated her. 
She — or her likeness — would dispute the boy’s life with him. 

As he had hated the sorcery of the Busignuolo, so he hated 
the vision of the unknown woman. What use were the boy’s 
promise, the boy’s faith, the boy’s foolish proud confidence in 
the empire on him of his dreams? Bruno knew well, a 
woman would look some day, — just look, — and all these 
things would be as vapors drifting before the break of day. 

“ Love kills everything, and then dies itself,” he said, bit- 
terly. “ Or perhaps it does not die : then it is a flame, 
always burning, burning, burning, till the body and the heart 
are cracked, empty, shrunken potsherds. That is love.” 

Signa shuddered a little. 

“ You frighten me,” he said. 

“ I wish I could,” said Bruno. 

And he knew that he could not ; that, say what he would, 
some single look from a woman’s eyes would undo it some day. 
He had never thought about it till he had seen that dancer 
with the pomegranate-blossom in the town ; but now he knew 
there would be a foe to him some day that he would not be 
able to break under his foot, as he had broken the Busig- 
nuolo. 


364 


SIONA. 


His heart was heavy, standing there in the white cold mists 
of the daybreak. 

To the boy, the future was a golden haze, a mirage full cf 
fair colors, a certainty of national love and public praise and 
sweet intoxication and all the liberty of an untrameled genius. 
To the man, the future was dark : he saw no way into it ; he 
had no faith in it ; he doubted the good faith of the world. 

No doubt it was because he was ignorant. He had told 
himself so ; but he had no belief in this fair fortune blown 
from the breath of other men. 

“ It is to plow and to sow in the sand-bed of the river,” he 
said to himself. And it seemed to him that Signa mistook 
the shadow of a reed for the sword of fire of an archangel. 

“ If your great world should turn against you, should tire 
of you, — they say it is capricious, — your heart will be broken,” 
he said, abruptly, with his hand on the lad’s shoulder. 

Signa looked up and smiled. 

“ No ; the world cannot hurt me. My music has gone 
down into the hearts of the people. It will live there. 
Nothing else matters.” 

“ But the world is changeable, I have heard.” 

“ Fashion is ; the people are not. In Milan the other day 
they sang the same chants in the cathedral that St. Gregory 
composed five hundred years after Christ. Nothing can hurt 
me now. If the great world did not want me, I know my 
force now. I should go through the countries, teaching my 
songs to the people everywhere. Heath itself would not hurt 
me very much, because, though dead, — they might forget me 
quickly enough, no doubt, but the music would live, and my 
soul would live in it. What else do I want?” 

“ I cannot understand,” said Bruno. “ You talk as if you 
had no body to be pained or pleased. One would think you 
were a spirit, to hear you. It is nonsense if one kill a night- 
ingale with a stone, then the song is killed too.” 

“ Perhaps not,” said Signa, softly. “ Perhaps a poet has 
passed and heard it, and sings the song over again to the 
world.” 

But Bruno did not see what he meant. 

“ One stones it, and it is dead ; there is an end,” he re- 
peated, with a sick, heavy sense of peril upon him, — of what 
he did not know clearly ; but it seemed to him that the boy 


SIONA, 


365 


walked with his head in the clouds and his feet in the quick- 
sands. 

He could not help it. 

He could not guard Signa’s steps, nor bend his eyes to 
earth. He was beyond him. He could only hope ; and with 
Bruno, do what he would, his hope had always the drooped, 
clipped wings of doubt. 

They stood silent together ; while the sun, behind the sea 
of snowy mist, shone golden in their faces. 

“ Dear,” he said, at last, “ you go away into a vast unknown 
world. I cannot help you, nor follow you nor even warn 
you, — not to do any good. I know the things of the soil, as 
well as any man ; but nothing else. No doubt you go to 
greatness, having won it for yourself already. And you so 
young ! And I suppose nothing else would ever have con- 
tented you ; so, it is best so. But there are things, I think, 
that will go hard with you, — one cannot tell ; you have not 
suffered yet, and you seem all mind, just as a flower is all 
bloom. That will not last : you will find the beast in you 
some day, — even you. Dear, it is not for me to preach, or 
teach, or counsel anything. I have led a bad life often, and I 
know nothing. If I were to begin to talk, I might hurt you. 
One fears to handle your soul : it is like a white moth, — to me. 
But what I want to say is just this. You know I promised 
your dead mother. What one says to the dead, one must keep 
faith to, more than to the living. The living can avenge 

themselves, but those poor dead Dear, will you remember ? 

I want to meet your mother, face to face, on the Last Day, 
and to just say to her, ‘ This is your boy ; I have done my 
best by him ; he comes back to you with a pure soul ; I have 
given my life for his.’ Will you remember? You are far 
away from me always now ; much farther than by miles. I 
can do nothing, only hope and fear. If evil do assail you, 
think of that. Help me to keep my faith with Pippa.” 

Signa heard him, — moved, subdued, perplexed. 

The great shadow of Bruno’s doubt fell also upon him. 

Was there so much more peril in the world than he knew? 

He bowed his head. 

“ I will try,” he said, simply. 

Bruno thought, “ He does not say, I will.” 

They left the house and went down' through the wet 
31 * 


366 


SIONA. 


woods and through the clouds that floated on the sides of the 
hills. 

Bofore another hour he was gone. 

Bruno stood a little while alone on the edge of the iron 
rails, listening to the distant thunder of the steam, as the last 
curl of the smoke disappeared in the windings of the valley. 
The fog had lifted and passed away. Mountain and river and 
vineyard and homestead stood out clear in the morning light ; 
his own hill rose above them all, — the quarries shining in the 
sun, the bold pines piled against the brightness of the sky. 

“ It is a good augury,” he said to himself. 

He tried to think so. 

He retraced his steps up the clifi* road, and went home alone, 
and yoked his oxen to the plow, and drove them up and down 
ben oath the vines, as on the day when Pippa’s body had drifted 
away on the face of the flood to the depths of the sea. 

“ It is a good augury,” he said to himself, as the glory of 
the morning spread over all the earth beneath him. 

But, though the sun shone, it seemed to him as if, on all 
the land and water, a great, empty, desolate silence had fallen. 

All was so still. 

He. was alone. 

“ The birds do not sing after vintage,” he told himself ; and 
tried to think that it was only that. 


CHAPTER XLI. 

Palma looked out of her cottage door, and saw the trail of the 
smoke too, going farther and farther away under the green leaves 
along by the river, round between the mountains. She watched 
it, shading her eyes, and turned slowly within into the house. 

He had not thought to say a word of parting that morning ; 
a kind, careless farewell, the night before, at the garden gate, 
when Bruno was by, — that had been all. 

“ Why do you cry, Palma?” said the youngest of her brothers, 
who was only twelve, and a cripple, with his small limbs mis- 
shapen and withered. 


SION A. 


367 


“ Do you ask ? — with father not six months in his grave ?” 
murmured Palma. 

Her heart smote her as she said it. She was lying to the 
child. 

She went about her daily work. It was for her as if she 
did it in the dark. But she did it, missing nothing, — not 
even slurring anything. There was so much to be done, with 
all those five boys, and two only of them earning anything. 

Once in that long, laborious day she stole up-stairs, and 
looked at the necklace. 

“ He was thinking that he was buying for Gemma,” she 
said, as she looked. 

Later in the day, the eldest son of Cecco, the cooper, came 
and leaned over the wall as she worked. He was a cooper too, 
and a fine-built youth, and well spoken of in the Lastra. 

“ You will not think of it, Palma?” he said to her, with 
his brown eyes wistful and sad. 

“ You are good ; but no, — never!” said Palma, and went on 
weeding. 

What he wanted her to think of was himself. He did not 
mind her cropped hair; that would grow. He loved her 
industrious ways, her independence, her patience, her care of 
her brothers. His father was well-to-do ; he would look over 
the absence of a dower. 

“ I shall not marry,” said Palma, always. 

And when the young cooper said, for the hundredth time, 
‘‘ You will not think of it?” in this warm, radiant, summer 
forenoon, Palma only said, “Never!” and went on, stripping 
her tomato-bushes of their fruit, and hoeing between the lines 
of her newly-set cauliflowers. 

She belonged, she said, to her brothers. So her living self 
did, — her body and her brain, such as it was, and her strong, 
laborious, untiring feet and hands. But her heart belonged 
to two other lives, — one dead and the other lost : the two lives 
that had been by hers in their childhood, in the moonlit lemon- 
alleys of Giovoli, and the calm shadows of the old church of 
St. Sebastian. 

Signa and Gemma were always together in her thoughts, — 
one dead, the other lost. 

Cecchino, the son of Cecco, could give her a good house in 
the Lastra, and a full soup-pot always, and a good store of house- 


368 


SIQNA. 


linen, and shoes and stockings, and a settled place in the world. 
Oh, yes ; she knew. And his mother, who was a tender soul, 
had said, “ He loves you : we will not mind about the dower, 
and you shall have my own self-spun sheets and my string of 
pearls.” And they were all good, — good as gold. And Beppo 
and Franco, who foresaw help for themselves in this union, 
upbraided her always, and railed at her when the bread was too 
stale or the sour wine ran short. 

But Palma — though she knew, none better, the worth of 
bread and wine in this life, and the use of a strong arm to bar 
the door against the Old Man Poverty whom the devil has 
given leave to hobble perpetually upon the earth and creep in 
at all cold hearths — Palma shook her head, and would not even 
think of it, however Cecchino besought her. 

“ I will not marry you ; I do not love you,” she told him. 
And Cecchino urged that marriage should come first, love last, 
with women. 

“ Not so,” said Pakna. “ That is to have the leaves bitter 
and the flowers leafless, — like the endive. But it is not only 
that. I will not marry. I will work for my brothers while 
they want it ; and when they do not want me, I will go into a 
convent, and rest so. That is what I mean to do. Our Lady 
willing.” 

And Cecchino could not change her. 

That was what she meant to do. 

Rest so, — a brown-faced, middle-aged woman, in a white 
coif, saying prayers in a little cell, on knees stiff from many 
years of toil, and going among the orphans and the poor, and 
tending dying souls, — that was how she saw herself in the 
future. 

It did not appall her. 

Any thought of marriage did. 

In the convent she would be able to pray for Signa and for 
Gemma; and then in heaven she might see their faces. 

Perhaps, if she worked very hard and prayed very much, 
the Madonna might call her up quickly, and give her some 
grace of beauty, there, in heaven to be like them. Sometimes 
she hoped that, quite humbly, and never sure that she could 
merit it. 

In the twilight of this day — having labored hard, and seen 
her brothers come and go, and smiled on them, and forced a 


SIGNA. 


369 


cheerful laugh for them, because a dull house was bad for boys 
and apt to drive them to the wine-shops and the lotteries — 
Palma stole up, foot-weary though she was, to the little church 
above the gardens of Giovoli. 

She carried her little crippled brother on her back, because 
he fretted if he were left long alone, and set him down wh(;n 
the last gleam of sun fell, and gave him a few pebbles to play 
with, which contented him, because he was not very bright of 
brain. 

Then she went herself and prayed in the nook by the column 
where the St. Cecilia hung. She had lost faith in it, because 
he had seemed to have none. He had thanked her for her 
thought of him, but he had never seemed to think it possible 
that it could have helped him in any way to fame. 

“ Keep him safe in the world, and let him meet Gemma in 
heaven,” she prayed ; and said it over and over again, in pas- 
sionate reiterated supplication, clinging to the pillar with her 
arms wound about it and her forehead pressed against its cold 
gray stone. 

She prayed there till the moon shone through the stained 
window on to the broken jasper ; and the little cripple cried 
because the air grew cold, and he could not rise to catch the 
glow-worm alight upon the altar-step. 

She did not ask anything for herself. 

Hard work for ten or twenty years longer, and then rest, — 
on the hard boards of a convent bed, and by the death-agonies 
of beggars. 

That was her future. 

It did not affright her. 

“ Only keep him safe on earth, — and her in heaven.” 

That was all she prayed. 

She was sure the saints would hear her. 

She came out into the moonlight, carrying the lame boy on 
her back, and with the glow-worm like a little lamp within her 
hand. She was almost happy. 

Prayers, innocent and in firm faith, brought the benediction 
of their own fulfillment. She was sure of that. 


370 


SIGNA. 


CHAPTEE XLII 

It was a sultry night northward. 

There was a storm in the air, but it had not broken. The 
great lake was curled by the faintest of breezes. There was 
the smell of oranges — leaf and flower and fruit — upon the air. 
Little boats went sailing through the shadows. The constel- 
lation of the Winged Horse shone clear high up in the 
heavens, though all round the horizon the skies were over- 
cast, — the Horse that has a star for his nostril, and that is 
plumed with strong desire, and that says to the poet, “ Mount, 
and ye shall enter the realms of the sun with me, and ride also 
through the endless night where Persephone lies sighing.” 

Signa — who did not know the stars by any name, but loved 
them as all dreamers do, and held them in that wistful awe 
which was with him one-half the terror of a child, one-half 
the wonder of a thinker — was drifting in a little boat over the 
quietness of the water, and looking up at Pegasus. 

They were giving his music at Como ; and they were about 
to bring the Lamia out in Milan. He went where his music 
went, as the way is in this country. But the small strife of 
the theatres, and the contentions and envious revilings, and 
the men and women with whom he had to do, were all pain- 
ful to him, — too rough, too real, too coarse for him. He 
broke from them whenever he could, and they had ceased to 
try and alter him ; he was no more fit for their world, they 
saw, than a young nightingale for a gay brawling street. They 
laughed at him, — which he seldom knew, or, knowing, did not 
heed, — and let him live in his own fashion as he liked, and 
made their money out of him, and said all genius was no 
better after all than an inspired idiocy, and he was such a boy : 
only a little peasant still, though he had so sweet a face and 
so soft a grace. 

Signa was careless of them, — utterly careless. 

He was so purely, naturally, innocently happy that nothing 
could much stir or trouble him. All the noise around him 
was like the sound of a whirlpool to a child seated high on 


SIGN A. 


371 


the rocks, who hears it, but only sees the silver sea-gulls and 
the sunshine. All the fret of their life could not hurt him ; 
he saw only the dreams and the destinies of his own. 

What was beautiful to him in those long months of wan- 
dering were not the pleasures which his associates found ; he 
hardly cared even for the praise that made his pilgrimages 
triumphs. What was beautiful to him were the changing 
mountains, the fresh wide waters, the unknown old cities, the 
treasuries of lost arts, the noble churches, the silent monas- 
teries, the lonely little towns that had all some wonder of 
stone or of color, the delicious free sense, as of a bird’s flight, 
with which he waSs borne from place to place, filling his brain 
with memories, as a child its hands with flowers, thinking 
each new one found still lovelier than the last. 

He drifted now in his little boat : a fisherman rowed him 
from point to point along the shores. He had talked to the 
man till they were both tired ; going with the current, little 
movement of the oars was needful ; the man sat mute, think- 
ing of his haul of fish of that morning ; Signa laid back, looking 
up at the radiance of Pegasus. 

He did not know it as the constellation that belongs to all 
who dream of any art, but its stars shone down on him with 
a bright serene light, and he thought how they were shining 
too upon the water and the hills about his home. 

His heart alwp,ys went back to the Lastra. 

His fondest fancy was of what should be his return to it, 
to raise works of marble like the palaces he saw, and live a 
great life in peace and pleasure, with a choir of young singers 
like himself around him, and the love of all the country with 
him. 

He was so young still ; such dreams were possible to him. 
His hands were filled with the fast-fading laurels of earth, but 
he believed them the changeless asphodels of heaven. 

The life of Rossini, had he seen it close, would have hurt 
him like a blasphemy. 

To Signa — reared in simple religious faiths, half pagan, 
half monastic, which were quite real to him — victory was ob- 
ligation. 

God had given him his desire ; so he thought. He said 
always to himself, “ What can I render back?” 

In so many things he was only a little peasant still. 


372 


SIONA. 


The boat floated along, rocked gently on the liquid dark- 
ness. 

He watched the stars, and dreamed, and dreamed, and 
dreamed, and seemed to see again, white upon the shadow, a 
statue he had seen that day at noon : the Love and Psyche 
of Can ova. 

Canova — whose soul was dead when he moulded the lascivi- 
ous charms of the Borghese Venus and the poor vulgar graces 
of the Dancing Girls — has put all his soul into this marble. 

For one moment, in his vision of the face of Love, he has 
reached the height where the Greek sculptors reign alone. 

In the face of Love there is the very heaven of passion, — 
all its longing, all its languor, all its ineffable abandonment 
and yearning, all its absolute oblivion, which makes it only 
live in one other life, and would let the earth dissolve and the 
heavens shiver as a burnt scroll, and take no heed, so that 
“ only from me this be divided never.” 

The boy had watched the statue long, with a strange sense 
of something missed in his own young years, — something un- 
known ; and like a hot wind over him had come the memory 
of the dancing girl of Istriel. 

He had hated the memory, yet there it came. 

Her face effaced the softer face of Psyche : Psyche, who is 
not worthy Love in the marble, as in the fable of the lamp. 

Floating along the shores of the lake he dreamed of the 
statue ; only, do what he would, instead of Psyche he saw 
always the form of the dancer of Istriel. And the boy in his 
ignorance smiled, remembering the warnings of Bruno. 

“ What does he know,” he thought, “ living on his hill 
there? All men love, — the lowest and the highest. One 
would be greater surely in all ways, not lesser, if one loved.” 

For he did not know that Love will only reach his height 
by treading all other things beneath his feet. He did not 
know that Love lends a fire divine to human souls only by 
burning all their world to waste. 

The boat paused at a bend in the shore, grated a little, 
and then was fastened to the land. 

Signa leaped out, with the fresh cool leaves smiting him 
sweet blows upon his eyes and mouth. They had reached 
the little village where he liked to sleep and see the dawn 
break over the lake better than to remain in Como, where the 


SIGNA. 373 

singers drank, and laughed, and quarreled until daybreak, and 
thought it ill of him unless he joined them. 

The boat went on to where the rower lived. Signa strolled 
a little on the shore. It was not late, and he could see the 
white-walled cottage where he had house-room among its 
orange-trees and myrtles, and he wished to watch the storm 
which, country-born and hill-bred as he had been, he knew 
was rising, though the lake was still. 

The village stood on a small creek ; its woods and thickets 
went to the water’s edge ; it was a wilderness of roses. It had 
a little white church, with one bell ; several huts and houses 
of peasants and fisher-people ; and a few villas that were sought 
by summer idlers and by rich strangers towards the early 
autumn time. 

Signa walked on the edge of the water, his feet in rose- 
leaves and fallen jessamine-flowers : its shore was all a garden, 
wild or cultured according as the proprietor of the soil were 
poor or rich. 

He wandered along till he lost sight of the roof of his own 
little dwelling, listening to the soft lapping of the little waves 
upon the stones and the splash of distant oars. 

All at once he paused. He saw a statue in the water 
through the leaves ; at least, he thought it so. It was the 
white figure of a woman, half clothed in close-clinging dra- 
peries, which with her right hand she held upward to her 
knees ; with the other hand she was gathering her hair into a 
great knot ; her naked feet were in the shining water ; her 
arms were bare too. She was quite still at the moment he 
saw her first, as though awaiting something ; the moon had 
come out of a heavy cloud, and fell on her, so that she looked 
a piece of sculpture, white as Psyche was. 

Then, tired of holding up her hair, she let it fall. in a sud- 
den shower, thrust the boughs of the wild roses apart, and 
stepped from the pebbles and the water on the shore. The 
movement brought her face to face with Signa. 

He saw she was no statue, but a woman ; young and living, 
and impatient of some delay ; dripping with water, which ran 
from her hair and limbs in silvery rain, and made her white 
thin garments cling to her. She had been bathing in the 
solitude of her gardens, into which he unwittingly had 
strayed. 


32 


I 


374 


SIGNA. 


Signa stood still and gazed at her, too much amazed, too 
startled, too confused, to move or speak. His face flushed 
with shame, — shame for himself and shame for her. 

“ Forgive me,” he murmured ; but his feet were rooted to 
the ground, his heart beat so loudly it seemed to him to fill 
the air. The woman, — all white there, with her shining limbs 
and shining hair tangled in the thickets of the roses, with her 
wet small feet like ivory upon the moss, — he thought it all a 
dream. 

She had started, too ; then she looked at him with a smile 
slowly uncurving the rose-leaves of her close pouted lips. 
She was in no wise embarrassed. She stood looking at him 
with the moon-rays full upon her, making the water-drops like 
pearls. 

Then she laughed, — a pretty laughter pealing through the 
garden silence. 

She shook her hair over her like a veil, her white arms and 
bosom shining through it as through a golden net-work, like 
cobwebs in the sun. 

Another woman ran quickly up to her with breathless ex- 
cuse for absence, holding a scarlet shawl in her outstretched 
arms. She let it be wrapped round her, and turned away, 
looking at Signa through her hair. 

“ Stay there,” she said to him ; “ stay there, and string a 
romance upon me. I am wet, — I was bathing. I will come 
back. Stay there !” 

He stood there, stupefied and entranced, as she had bidden 
him ; not sure, still, whether it were a woman indeed, or only 
a statue that his fancy warmed. 

He was not sure that all was not a trick of his own imagi- 
nation, and of the sudden shining of the moon out from the 
dark night. 

He stood, bewildered and breathless, listening with throbbing 
pulses to every noise in the leaves and on the water. If she 
were a living creature, she had bidden him wait. 

For his life he could not have moved away. 

He felt hot with shame for her if she were indeed a living 
thing. 

Strange stories he had heard in the old folk-lore of the 
Lastra — where people believe in many an eerie phase of the 
night-side of nature — came over him with a shiver. What 


SIGNA. 


375 


human thing could have looked half so white? or could have 
borne his gaze straightly without a blush? or could have 
laughed in his face as she had done ? 

His brain was giddy, his heart beat high : he glanced up 
to find his stars, but they were gone, — the clouds had covered 
them. The rose-boughs rustled, the grasses seemed to thrill, 
the shallow water shimmered at his feet. Would she come 
back, or had she only mocked him ? Was she like the beau- 
tiful white woman who cannot forget her crimes, but wakes 
from her grave and strays all night through the great forsaken 
gardens of the Medici? He shuddered as he thought, — he 
who had been reared where the people believe in the ghostly 
wanderings of Bianca Capello. 

He longed for her back again, and yet he feared her. He 
strained his eyes to watch for her in the gloom, and yet he 
was afraid, — afraid as he had never been in his childhood going 
in the darkness over the lonely hill-lands peopled with the 
spirits of the dead, as peasants told him. 

It might have been hours that he waited there, it might 
have been but moments ; he could not tell which, he had no 
sense of time; but the moon was still shining when he saw 
her. 

She came under the leaves of the orange-trees through the 
crossing rose-boughs to him ; she was still wrapped in white, 
— some glistening thing with silver in it, like a spider’s web 
that has caught the dew; her wet hair fell over her shoulders; 
her feet were shod in soft white furs ; she had put a string of 
pearls about her throat, which gleamed a little as snow does 
as she moved ; she came through the shining moonlit leaves, 
bending down towards him and smiling. 

“ I have come back. Why, how you look ! I was too wet 
to stay. I know you, — yes. I saw you last night, and once 
before in Venice. Signal Why, how you look!” 

He fell at her feet, touching the hem of her white robe 
with tremulous, timid hands, and gazing up at her with eyes 
of doubt and fear and adoration, because she was so wonder- 
fully fair to look at, and yet he was afraid of her as of a crea- 
ture not of earth and not of heaven, just such a lovely terrible 
thing as that which walked at midnight in the old green gardens 
of the Medici. 

“ What are you?” he murmured, with the soft grace of a 


376 


SIGNA. 


poet’s homage. “You know me — you? Oh, speak a little! 
Are you my Lamia, that I have dreamed of so often? Or 
are you Psyche that I saw at noon? You cannot be a living 
thing: you are too beautiful.” 

She stooped, and with her soft, cool hands ruffled the thick 
hair falling on his brow, and laughed, and threw a rose against 
his lips. 

“ Lamia 1 Psyche 1 They are dead : I live. Know you ! 
Of course I know you. And when I saw you at Venice I 
was glad; only I said, ‘He shall not see me yet, — not yet.’ 
And was it all mere chance to-night? I thought perhaps you 
knew, and came. No? Why, how you look I But, indeed, 
how should you know me? I was a little ragged thing. How 
well it was we ran away that fair-day, and how sad you were, 
and how you cried ! — and yet I made you play. Poor Signa 1” 

She, stooping still above him, put her fresh lips to his hair 
and kissed him on the eyes ; and then she laughed again, and 
then again she leaned to kiss him. 

But Signa had sprung upward to his feet. 

His face was very pale; his eyes had horror in them and 
amaze. 

“Gemma!” he muttered. “Gemma! Gemma!” 

A cloud of anger gathered on the fairness of her face. 

“Yes, I am Gemma. Well — ?” 

“ Gemma !” 

He said the little familiar name again and again, stupidly as 
a man says a charm, gazing upon her in the moonlight. He 
had looked for her among the poor maidens of the working 
world, among the crowds at mass ; he had thought often of 
finding her lonely, longing for home, repentant of her fiight, 
living in some little nook among the roofs, making her daily 
bread by some sad means ; and he had dreamed of how he 
would raise her up and take her back and crown her with his 
laurels and make her glad. This was Gemma. 

This beautiful thing unshamed, who came to him wet from 
the water and laughed, with the moonlight on her wet, half- 
naked limbs. This was Gemma. 

She was silent. A great anger obscured the beauty of her 
face, but there was a touch of shame with it. Her hands tore 
a rose asunder and threw the leaves on either side of her. She 
had looked for the passionate rapture with which all her years 


SIGNA. 


377 


were full : this mute rebuke in its gentleness smote her dully 
like a blow. 

He stood looking at her with a dazzled, bewildered pain ; he 
was not certain that he was awake; he thought of Palma pray- 
ing for her sister and sure she was with Christ. 

“ Gemma ! Is it you, Gemma ?” he murmured. “ You were 
a little ragged thing, — you were so poor, — and now you have 
those pearls about your throat. Palma was sure you were in 
heaven, but I said no. I always said that I would find you, 
only I thought so differently. I always hoped, so lonely, so 
penniless, so sorrowful for them all at home; and then I 
thought how I would take you back, and we would love you 
all the better for the sorrows you had had. And now you are 
like this. Ah, God !” 

His voice shook, his lips trembled ; the words were all inco- 
herent, confused, almost foolish ; but she knew all he meant. 

“ Poor! lonely! sorrowful !” she echoed; and her azure eyes 
laughed back at him, though they had more rage than mirth. 
“You thought I should be that? — I? Did I not get the 
things I wanted always ? You forget.” 

“ That is what Bruno said,” he muttered, and was still. 

“ Bruno !” 

She had forgotten nothing ; nor had she forgiven anything, 
child though she had been. 

When Bruno had dragged her off the sands by the sea away 
from the gifts and the praises of the great people, she had 
marked it in her thoughts, a thing to be avenged. Between 
the manhood of Bruno and her babyhood there had been 
always war.* 

“ Your father died in Lent,” said Signa, suddenly. He 
did not know what to say. He fancied still she was some 
shadowy thing that mocked him in the moonlight, not Gemma 
living. 

She looked grave and troubled for a moment. 

“ Died ! He was not old ?” 

“ No, he was not old.” 

He echoed the words unconsciously. He did not know 
what he felt. His heart seemed stifled. He caught her hands 
in his. 

“ Oh, Gemma ! is it true? Oh, my dear, speak to me more ! 
I never have forgotten you, Gemma. After my music I loved 

32 * 


378 


SIGNA. 


you best of anything; yes, better than Bruno, I think, — • 
heaven forgive me ! You were a little, troublesome, cruel child, 
but you were — Gemma. Oh dear, it cannot be ! — you did not 
seem to have any woman’s shame about you just now looking 
at me in the water ; and then those pearls, and all this dainty, 
delicate stuff like silver. Gemma, oh. Gemma ! tell me, for the 
good God’s sake, you are not a thing that your father can never 
meet in heaven ? You are not — lost to us all forever?” 

Her eyelids were dropped as he spoke, and there was not 
light enough for him to see the changes that passed over her 
face, — anger, contempt, derision, trouble, amusement, all fol- 
lowing one another, each and all moved in her by his simple 
words, but none reaching any depth. 

She hesitated a moment how to answer him, he seemed to 
her so foolish, — oh, so foolish ! and yet she did not wish for 
his disdain or his rebuke. She thought she would cheat him 
just a little while, — to see. 

She looked at him with the old pouting anger on her lovely 
mouth, the anger he had known so well when the little child 
in the gardens of the Giovoli was thwarted in her whim. 

“You are very quick to judge me ill,” she murmured. 

“ Ah, dear, if I judge you wrong, may God heap coals of 
fire on my head. But what can I think. Gemma ? Answer 
me, dear ; answer me truly. I could not hate you. Gemma, 
not if you were fallen to the vilest depths. Palma might, — I 
do not know. I could not. Oh, my dear, do tell me truly, 
what fate have you found in the world ? What thing have 
you become ? When they said that you were dead, I loathe^S 
myself for letting you have your way that morning, and so 
letting you drift to your own misery ; but oh, my dear, my 
dear, — if it should be with you so that death at its worst 
would have been better ! I do not judge you. Gemma ; only 
tell me — tell me truth !” 

He knelt down before her in his eagerness and pain ; he 
held her hands ; his face, as it looked up to hers, was white 
with fear and with anxiety. 

She was so lovely, too, above him in the shadows, with the 
rose-boughs caught against her and the wet gold of her hair 
touching the silvered orange-leaves. 

“ Am I not beautiful, Signa?” she murmured. “ The rest? 
What does the rest matter, — for a woman ?” 


SIGNA. 


379 


“ Oh, God ! Is that all you say ?” 

He rose again to his feet. Almost he hated her, this per- 
fect, shameless thing. And yet she was so beautiful. Looking 
at her, he shaded his eyes as from the sun or the heat of fire. 

“ Poor Palma !” he muttered. “ Day and night she prays 
Christ for your soul.” 

“ My soul !” 

Gemma smiled, — a soft, slow smile. 

Then she looked at him full in the eyes. She did what she 
would with any man that way. 

“ You are too quick to judge. Come hack to-morrow, to 
the house yonder. Now it is nearly morning. I am cold still 
after the water. I bathe by moonlight because a negress told 
me I should keep my beauty so ; there is a charm in it. Good- 
night. Oh, you will come, — yes, I know that. No ! Do not 
stop me. I am cold, I say. Good-night. Come back to- 
morrow.” 

She drew her white clinging clothes, out from his grasp, and 
laughed a little ; for indeed she was amused, though troubled, 
and put the orange-boughs aside, and threw another rose at 
him, and went : whither he could not see, the night had grown 
quite dark. 

“ Gemma ! Gemma ! stay !” he cried to her. “ If you be 
Gemma, do not leave me so !” 

But he called to her in vain. 

He was alone. 

The first thunder of the coming storm rolled over from the 
mountains ; a shrill wind blew on the lake-water ; the rain- 
drops fell. 

She left him to meet the tempest as he might. Wet 
through, he reached with difficulty the little cottage higher by 
the shore. 

It was dawn ; but the dawn was darker than the night had 
been. 

The hurricane was severe, and the sullen lake wrecked more 
than one boat that in the moonlight had danced lightly on its 
smiling surface. 

Signa did not even try to sleep. 

He watched the storm. 


380 


SIGNA. 


CHAPTER XLIII. 

There were thunder and lightning and wild north winds 
all over land and sea, even to the great plains on either side 
the Apennines. 

The storm traveled as far as the Valdarno, reaching there 
by morning, and men watched the rivers, fearing flood again, 
and farmers thanked the saints that maize-harvest and vintage 
had been safely passed. 

Palma working in the flelds for a small wage above upon 
the slopes, and driven to seek refuge from the violence of the 
weather, sheltered herself in St. Sebastian’s little church, 
where the sheep also huddled together out of reach of the 
rain. 

She was not afraid. 

She told her beads and said her prayers as the blue light- 
nings flashed around her, and the winds howled. 

“ Dear God, keep him safe from harm,” she prayed. “ And 
let Gemma, who is with you, where no storms come, watch 
over him.” 


CHAPTER XLIV. 

Meanwhile, the woman of his vision let her people un- 
clothe her, and she lay down in her white soft bed, and thought: 
the storm might beat without, she paid no heed to it ; it might 
wreck boats, flood fields, kill birds and beasts and butterflies, 
send men and women homeless over ravaged farms, but her it 
could not hurt. Why should she think of it ? 

She was amused, and yet there was disquiet at her heart. 

She hated all the old dead time ; hated the bare memory of 
it, — of its hunger, of its cold, of its hardship, of her little 
naked feet, of her dirty, merry, kindly father, of her bed of 
hay, of her platter of wood. She hated it all ; and it had 
sprung up before her suddenly till it all seemed alive. 


SIGN A. 


381 


She liked never to think of it, — never. It was for that that 
in Venice, seeing her old playmate the hero of the hour, she 
had left the town whilst still unknown to him. 

And yet she had wanted to show herself to him. 

“ Chance shall choose,” she said to herself, and when she 
had recognized him in the moonlight among the orange-leaves 
she had walked straight to him. 

She was glad, upon the whole; though ruffled, and dis- 
turbed, and angered, too, because of his strange way of taking 
things. 

It made her lie awake and think of the old years, and the 
skill with which she, a little hungry ragged child, one among 
many, had got to have her beauty known all over many cities, 
and to have those big pearls — big as linnets’ eggs — about her 
throat, when she was tired of her diamonds. But pearls best 
became her; that she knew. Older women have need of 
diamonds to lend new lustre to dimmed charms ; but she was 
fresh as any rose. And she was known as “ Innocence.” So 
she wore oftenest her big pearls, that no empress could have 
beaten ; as her sister peasants away in Tuscany wmre their 
little seed-pearls on feast-days among the brown hillfields. 

Lying awake now, with the blue of her eyes just gleaming 
under her curled lashes, she thought of that fair-day in Prato, 
and of the sunny tamarisk-trees by the shore, and of her 
struggle from the window, and her hurry across the wharves, 
and her escape in the brown-sailed fishing-smack that her 
captor had bribed to take them over the open sea. 

She thought of how she had laughed and danced and clapped 
her hands as the rough old boat spread its wet sail and rocked 
and tore before the wind that rose as the day declined, and 
blew hot and hard from the southeast, while the man said to 
her, “No more black bread, my pretty pet : all cakes and fruit 
in the future.” 

It had not been all cakes and fruit at first. 

When he was sure of her he beat her. She bit his hand 
through. He tumbled her among a score of other children, 
older and younger, and took them to northern cities, and sent 
them about, some on stilts and in spangles, some with white 
mice and music, some with little statues, — all thrashed, and 
starved, and made to do his bidding. 

Her fate was what the Lastra fancied that it was, knowing 


382 


SIGN A. 


how many children of this sort there are, kidnapped to shiver 
in the wet sad north. 

But this endured only a very little while, with her. 

She was so pretty. He knew her value. He would not 
leave her too hungry, or send her out in too cold weather. 
He knew that she was like a good wine, and would pay well 
for keeping. 

One day once more he beat her. 

She darted into the street, and showed her little shoulders, 
and all the bruises, and sobbing drew a crowd grieved and 
indignant round her. 

That crowd set on the man, and hounded him out of the 
town under a rain of stones ; a good old woman took her 
home, weeping over her, and gave her a home. 

That was three months after the fair at Prato, and took 
place in the town of Mechlin. 

She lived there a few years like a little mouse in a sugar- 
closet ; the woman was aged, childless, and well olF, keeping a 
lace-shop in the midst of the beautiful, grave, quaint, gray 
little city. 

She was petted, pampered, fed on dainties ; she teased all 
the girls, and made all the boys slaves for her ; she learned 
to read ; she stole anything she wished for and could not get 
without stealing, and was either never found out, or else always 
forgiven ; people said she had a face like the little Jesus. 

Then she got tired. At Kermesse there came into the 
place a troop of players. 

She went to see them. 

The chief of them said to himself, “ What a beautiful 
child !” and spoke to her a little later as she trotted to mass. 

He tempted her to join them. She was too young to act, 
but she could sing a little. He said he would make pieces on 
purpose for her. She should just show herself; he said that 
would be enough. He painted the world and his wandering 
life in bright colors. 

She pondered well, and weighed the matter, as her wont was, 
with solid sense, and no idle misleadings of fancy. She never 
dreamed. She only said to herself, “ What is best for me?” 
and what she saw was best she chose. 

If any suffered by her doing, she said to them, as the plow- 
man to the flower, “ Is it my fault that you grow in my way ?” 


SIONA. 


383 


Born in a little hut in the green leafy solitudes of a garden, 
she had been gifted at birth with the fine sense which leads 
straight to success, — the sense of the paramount claims of self. 

She pondered a while till the players were on the wing ; 
then she took a pretty quantity of the oldest and most delicate 
lace, some gold out of the till in the little shop, and all her 
clothes, and went with them, slipping out of the house at 
night whilst the old woman was sleeping. 

“ I can always go back if I want,” she thought. “ She 
will always forgive me anything.” 

And she ran out of the city to join her new friends outside 
the gates, with a heavy bundle but a light heart. 

She was then thirteen. 

The old woman, who loved her, waking to her loss, would 
not believe that the child was to blame; and when people told 
her that the child had been seen going out of her own free 
will to the north, she would not credit them: robbers had 
taken the lace and the gold, and killed the child, — that was 
her certainty. And being old, and all alone, and taking it too 
much to heart, she was never able to leave her bed again, and 
in a few weeks died of it. 

Meanwhile the child throve. 

The people she had joined were gay and good-natured, and 
merry if not wise ; and in their way well-to-do. They adored 
her. She did as she liked. For the lace she had taken no 
one molested her. She showed herself nightly in little bright 
laughter-loving towns and cities. She had little to do, still less 
to say ; they looked at her : that was quite enough. 

She had not talent of any kind ; but she had a shrewd 
sense that to let her lovely baby face look like a little angel’s 
was enough : and it was so. 

When she was nearly sixteen, the people went to play in 
the city of Paris. She said to herself, “ Now 1” 

She refused to play, with a true foresight : she would not 
cheapen herself. She put her old white Flemish lace all about 
her like a cloud ; she looked half like a cherub, half like a 
nun. She went and strayed by herself through gilded gates 
into the first public gardens that she saw. 

It was summer, and the alleys were full of people ; they all 
looked after her ; she thought how good a thing it was to live. 

The painter Istriel met her. 


384 


SIGNA. 


He was rich. 

The players saw her no more. 

After three months he painted her as “ Innocence” looking 
with wondering eyes upon the world. 

Nature gave her loveliness ; Istriel gave her fashion. 

Three years later he painted her as the Sister of the Seven 
Dancers. 

But by that time he had had many rivals. 

He professed content. He cherished bitterest remembrance. 

She had only used him. He had loved her. 

To others he seemed to have passed from her lover to her 
friend indifferently ; himself he knew that jealousy would 
never die in him whilst she had life. 

She knew it too. It diverted her. 

It never prevented her from smiling on whosoever most 
])leased her caprices and most lavished upon her the wealth 
she loved. 

For the rest, she was at the height of her supremacy, and 
she never let it make her dizzy ; she kept the calm, wise, steady 
judgment of her own advantage that she had possessed even 
when a little child ; and she cherished her loveliness, studied 
her health, moderated her follies, and garnered her riches with 
a wisdom most rare in her world of pleasure. 

Many lost fortune, many their senses, some few their lives, 
for her. 

Nothing of that kind stirred her for a moment. 

The vainest could not flatter himself that he owed her 
smile to anything except his jewels and his gold; the vainest 
could not deceive himself that she had ever loved him. 

She loved herself ; just as much now that she had the world 
at her feet, as when she had been a little child, eating the white 
currants and green almonds in her nest of hay. 

Love, though the highest selfish ecstasy, must yet have self- 
forgetfulness. 

She had none. 

She could enjoy. But she could not suffer. 

“ How much shall I tell him ?” she thought, lying with 
half-closed eyes watching the lights flicker over the ivory and 
silver of her mirror. 

“ Why should she tell him anything ? Why should she 
see him ? She did not want him. To her he would never be 


SIGNA. 


385 


anything but Signa, the little, silly, dreaming fellow that had 
run about for her, and given up his fruit for her, and fallen into 
fault uncomplainingly for her sake. She had made him her 
stepping-stone to fortune ; then had done with him ; why not ?” 

And yet now she had seen him, she did not choose to let 
him go. 

He condemned her; he. sorrowed over her; he rebuked 
her ; — he ! — who had been her little slave, running where she 
would, and doing her will in the summer dust of the Lastra. 

With noon she was ready for him. 

She was alone in the little lake palace. 

It belonged to the painter Istriel. 

When she wanted rest and seclusion she went to it, know- 
ing how to keep her beauty fresh and render her favor more 
precious. 

He was content that men should think his old ties with her 
not wholly broken. 

He was now in the steppes of the North. He had visited 
her passing by. She always smiled on him. She was a little 
afraid of him. 

Besides, she never turned any man against her ; she only 
would have her own way always, — that was all. She wore 
her lovers as she did her jewels ; some had their turn often, 
some seldom, some forever waited for a day that never came, 
— but all were hers ; she could shut them in the hollow of 
her rosy hand, as in the gardens of Giovoli she had held the 
butterflies. 

She was never swept away on any strong tide, not even of 
caprice. 

She kept her brain clear always. 

She was not clever ; but she had far sight. 

She got all the best the world could give her, and was as 
calm amidst it all as a dormouse in its nest of wool. No one 
could quote a folly against her. 

She walked wisely. 

With noon they told her Signa had come there. She let 
him wait. She always let them wait. Waiting heightened 
the imagination and spurred expectancy. Besides, she was 
never in any haste herself. 

• He had been shown into a little cabinet, which had statues 
in it, and one great window looking on the lake. 

R 33 


386 


SIGNA, 


He was standing when she entered. 

He was very pale : he had been all daybreak on the shore, 
rendering what help he could against the storm, which now 
had passed away entirely and had gone southward. 

They looked at each other a moment in silence, these two 
who had run together over the stony road and ventured their 
little fortunes into the noisy press of Prato Fair. 

Their fiites had divided there, and yet the link of union 
never could be quite broken. 

They looked at each other, remembering that hot, toilsome 
day when they had eaten their figs under the trees of the dead 
Medici ; and when, in the tumult and the merriment of Fra 
Lippo’s town, she had laughed at his tears, and pulled him by 
his curls, and whispered, “ I am hungry — play — get me some 
cakes so. Ho you hear me? Play !” And he had played. 

She looked at him, and thought, “ He is not changed one 
whit ; he is the same ; only a boy still.” 

He looked at her, and thought, “ Can she be Gemma ? It 
is some goddess, dreamt of in the night.” 

They had run hand in hand across the plain to Prato. But 
there were worlds, centuries, all the heights of heaven, all the 
depths of hell, between them now. 

She put her hands out to him. 

“ Signa, — dear Signa, — sit by me.” 

He took her hands and let them go. 

“No. Tell me first.” 

She sighed a little. 

“ You used to love me, Signa.” 

“ I loved a little child called Gemma — yes.” 

“ And I am Gemma.” 

He was silent. 

He would not sit by her. He was confused and blinded. 
Her loveliness lost nothing by the morning light. 

But he felt to recognize her less than he had done in the 
dim shifting shadows of the night. She had no more in com- 
mon with the little, sturdy, ragged, mischievous baby he had 
kissed in her bed of hay, than the butterfly seems to have to 
do with the chrysalis. He felt still that he must be in a dream ; 
when he had fallen asleep over his score, in his half-starving 
student days, such dreams had come to him. 

“ If you are Gemma indeed,” he said, with effort, “ have 


SIQNA. 


387 


you nothing to say of your own home ? of your father, who 
died thinking of you? of your brothers? of Palma? Is that 
all forgotten ? Do you never think ?” 

She would not let him see the anger in her. 

“ I was so young,” she murmured. “ Children do not think.” 

“No? Palma thinks. She said, ‘ G-emma is dead. Else 
she never would be silent all these years.’ She prays for you.” 

“ Is she in want of anything?” 

“ She wants everything. She works like a mule. But she 
would never take anything. Palma would be ashamed.” 

Gemma put out her under lip with the sullen contemptuous 
gesture of her infancy. But she answered him gently. 

“ Palma was always good' Yes, — I remember that. Poor 
Palma!” 

“ Gemma, — ^if you be Gemma, — need Palma, with all your 
glory, be ashamed of you ? Tell me : you said that you would 
tell me now.” 

“ Sit by me, and I will.” 

“ No 1 not till I know whose roof I find you under, and why 
you are — like this.” 

“ What is it to you ?” 

“ Nothing. Only, if you are a base woman I want to see 
your face no more. I loved you when we were two little chil- 
dren. It would hurt me like a sister’s shame.” 

He spoke simply and directly the thing he felt ; he was 
calmer than he had been in the sultry, moonlit night ; he was 
cooled as the air was ; he felt oppressed and pained, but it was 
with sorrow for the little child that had run with him in the 
dust and heat, not for the woman that faced him with her 
shining eyes. 

Over Gemma’s face rose a quick flush of anger and amaze ; 
all her world envied her. 

She had no sense of shame. Shame, like remorse, only visits 
women that are left alone. 

Gemma played with all the glories of life, as a child with a 
ball of flowers. 

She repressed the rage and wonder that she felt. She could 
assume what shape she would. 

“ If I were base,” she muttered, “ might I not need more 
tenderness? You are too narrow, Signa; and too harsh.” 

“I! Harsh?” 


388 


SIGNA. 


“ I think so. You only love your music. You see nothing 
outside that.” 

He was silent. 

Was he harsh? He did not mean to be so. He had said 
what he had felt. If she were no longer innocent, he wished 
to go away and see her face no more. He had meant no 
bitterness. 

“ You do not understand,” he said, at last. “ I blame no 
living thing; I am not wise enough. Only there are straight, 
simple things one feels about women like an instinct, — just as 
when one keeps one’s honor clean, — do you not know ? You 
see, I have always thought about you ; and reproached myself; 
and dreamed so much of finding you and taking you back to 
your own people ; and when Bruno said, seeing the picture of 
a wanton dancer, ‘ That is what your Gremma is now, if she be 
living,’ I almost hated him ; it seemed to hurt me so ; because, 
though you were willful and liked your own way too well, yet 
I was sure you were too true and brave for that, and would 
have thought of Palma. Hear, if your life is honest, take my 
hand. If you be any man’s wife, and come by all this luxury 
and riches justly, dear, I will beg for your forgiveness on my 
knees. But else — what can I think ?” 

She was silent. A certain darkness fell upon her life. She 
was like the Syrian king ; all the fairness and richness of her 
Palestine grew naught to her, because she was shut out from 
one little, narrow, lonely vineyard. 

“ What shall I say to him?” she thought. “ What shall I 
say, to keep him ?” 

She wanted to keep him, and yet her heart was hard and 
sullen with rage against him. He had lifted the golden apples 
in her basket of silver, and had scorned them ; she was aston- 
ished and dully angered. 

But she was never swept away on any impulse, not even on 
that of anger, which was the strongest with her. 

She looked up at last, and saw his eyes watch her with a 
piteous tender eagerness, and he held out his hands to her. 

“ I cannot take your hands,” she said ; “ no, not in fairness. 
And yet I am not to blame ; not in the way you think. Signa, 
I owe you nothing. I need tell you nothing. Yet, because 
we were children together, as you say, I will tell you all the 
truth.” 


SIGNA. 


389 


And then she built him up a tale of lie-s, such as would 
touch him most. Poor Signa ! whose face had paled if she 
had trapped a bird, whose heart had sorrowed for each kid that 
went to slaughter, in the old times, when the Lastra and its 
green vine-ways had been the only world to both of them. 

To Bruno and his people he was changed utterly. They 
looked up at him from the twilight of their ignorance and 
obscurity. To her he was changed in nothing. She looked 
down on him from the broad noonday on the heights of her 
prosperity. 

For five full years she had studied the full world of men ; 
to her he was only a boy, a peasant, a dreamer, a fool, — in- 
spired perhaps, but only the greater fool for that. 

Outside there was the shining beauty of lake, and wood, 
and mountain; within, the softly-shaded room, filled with 
paintings, statues, flowers. Gemma in her white robes of 
morning, dead white, such as made the fairness of her look 
like a rose set among lilies, turned a little from him, half lying 
among her cushions, and told him the story of her life from 
that day of the fair in Prato. 

“ Dear Signa, I was a little willful selfish thing. I warjted to 
see a bigger brighter life than any we had upon our hills. The 
man persuaded me. He promised me all sorts of golden toys, 
and never-ending feast-days. Yes. He took me with him in 
that fishing-smack. We were hidden in Genoa a little while, 
then we went tiorthward. We were treated like beaten dogs, 
once in his power. There were many other children. He sent 
us out in rain, and wind, and snow. To him it did not matter 
what we suffered. We sold images, or tumbled in the streets, 
or hawked flowers, or went with an organ. We wandered 
from town to town, — all over the world sometimes, I think; 
we crossed seas often, and mountains; where I do not know; 
I was a little stupid thing. I was made black and blue 
with thrashing. Dear, I was punished for my selfish fault ; 
punished beyond all telling. Night after night I cried myself 
asleep, longing for you, and Palma, and green Giovoli. In 
a few years the man sold me to a set of player-people, low 
comedians, who went about with a traveling theatre, and 
dressed me up in spangles, and whipped me to make me dance. 
Nay, dear, how pale you look! Oh, it is all over, — that. I 
had no talent. You know I never had talent as you had. 

33 * 


390 


SIGNA. 


Nature has made me so good to look at; it does not matter 
for the rest. I did not act well ; I was just looked at, and of 
course I could jump and dance, — you will remember that. 
You recollect old Maro from the Marches teaching us the sal- 
terello, and you and I dancing it every minute that we could? 
And at the fkir, how pleased they were, and you, with the great 
tears running down your cheeks all the while you danced it! 
Ah, yes, yes, yes! Signa, it seems like yesterday.” 

She paused a little while, and turned her head away still 
further; his heart ached for her; he longed to take her hands, 
and kiss her lips, and say, “We will forget that any time has 
passed;” but a dark wall seemed to him between them. He 
could not think of her, of this lovely woman in her wealth, 
as Gemma, little ragged rosy Gemma, pouting and laughing 
in his face in the Giovoli garden, because Tista had swung 
her so high, so high. 

“Oh, my dear! oh, my poor lost love!” he murmured, and 
bowed his young head upon her knees; his frame shook with 
pain and the shock of the first burning rage that had ever 
touched him. 

He was bewildered. Horror possessed him. The simple, 
innocent affection he had kept for her shuddered and grieved 
for her, as a brother’s would have done. He had kept Gemma 
in his fiincy and his hope so pure, and safe, and strong. The 
darkness of this irreversible fate spread over her, and made 
her terrible to him. Signa had all the childlike belief in 
heaven that a child has in its father ; this struck his belief at 
the roots. God was good, and yet let such things be ! God 
was great, and yet would be forever powerless to make this 
horror as though it had never been. There were things then 
that even God could not do ! Signa stared helpless at this 
wreck of all his faiths. 

And even if she were indeed Gemma, as she said, and as 
her remembrance proved, what could he say to her — until he 
knew ? 

The sense around him of her golden shame stifled him, and 
kept him mute. He felt as Palma would have felt. It was 
not this woman that he cared for ; it was his little playmate 
lost on the sands of the Tyrolese sea. 

“I was sold to these players,” she said; “sold just as a 
monkey might be, or a goat that knew some tricks. They sold 


SIGN A. 


391 


me in their turn to others. I was made into little Loves, and had 
wings, and looked pretty ; or else danced in pretty costumes ; 
we went here, and there, and everywhere ; they treated me 
well and 1 liked it. I knew no better. I had sweetmeats, 
and fruit, and fine words. It was all good enough, and merry 
enough, I thought. You know of old, if ^11 went well, I did 
not want to look farther ; and indeed, what did I know ? or 
what could I have done ? A child all alone, and a thousand 
miles, they said, away from home ! Among them I learned 
to read, and learned some few other things. I do not know 
much, except the world. That is so big a book, you know ; 
one does not want another. Signa, try and understand. Do 
not be harsh ; I was not great of heart, and near to heaven, 
as you were when you were a child ; nor plodding, and honest, 
and loving the saints, like Palma. I loved — myself, and 
wanted to enjoy. God made me such a weak and selfish 
thing. You know he makes bees and butterflies. Dear, I 
was in so bad an air ; it reeked with shamelessness ; if you had 
anything to sell., your body or your soul, you sold it, and spent 
the money ; why not ? they said. When I was sixteen they 
betrayed me. We were in Vienna, then ; there was a woman 
that I trusted. When I knew the thing that they had made 
me, I grew blind and reckless ; I was turned to stone, only 
stone that shut a devil in it, as the marble shuts a toad some- 
times, they say. He who had bought me — bought me stupe- 
fied, like any moth you kill with sulphur smoke — was rich and 
a great man in his way. He covered his new toy with dia- 
monds and gold. I grew the fashion. You have fame. That 
is another thing. Fame is a comet burning itself with its 
own fire as it travels. Fashion is the wax-light in a ball-room. 
I like the ball-room best. You see space, and all the worlds 
set round about what men will call the throne of God, no 
doubt. But I ” 

She laughed a little ; she had forgotten for the moment that 
she did not mean to let him see the truth of her, — not then, 
whatever afterwards might come. 

He listened ; his breath came brokenly ; his lips were dry. 
He raised his head, and gazed at her, almost blankly. 

“ You can jest !” 

The words recalled to her the thing she wished to seem to 
him. 


392 


SIONA. 


“ Yes. I jest ; if you call tliat jesting. I saw a man onco 
watch his house burn : the fire took his children, and made 
him a beggar : he laughed. So I laugh. Oh, my dear ! they 
have not left me any heart to laugh — or cry. I would say, I 
pray they have not ; if I were you or Palma. But then I 
never had much. . I loved myself, you will remember that. 
Such love is punished. So your priests say. Well, you see 
now how it was with me : sixteen years old ; a chattel pur- 
chased ; a decked slave ; a ruined thing made glorious with 
gilding. I am not meek, I am not good, Signa ; you knew 
me when we were both babies. You know I had no mercy 
or gentleness to others, even then. I saw myself base, by no 
fault of my own. I saw myself marked out with a brand, 
proscribed, outcast, whilst I was myself as innocent as any 
yearling lamb we ever played with on the hill at home. Well, 
I did not drown myself. I was too full of life. I looked at 
my own face in the mirror, and I loved it.- I could not give 
it to the water-rats to gnaw. You love your music. I love 
my loveliness. Why is one love, one vanity, worse than the 
other ? Can you tell me ? Nature put the rhythm in your 
brain. It put the beauty in my body. Well, why should the 
love of one be holiness in you, the other sin in me ? But, 
sin or not, I have it. If disease made me hideous, or acci- 
dent, then I would kill myself with smoke or opiates, or some 
easy gentle means of death. Not otherwise. No ; I did not 
kill myself when I knew the thing I was. Your women of 
romance do ; but for me, I shrink from being hurt ; I hate 
the thought of lying under ground and leaving all the rest to 
laughter in the sunshine. To cease to — it is horrible ! 
Oh, not for you who think that death will set your spirit free 
and carry it straight to some great world where all your 
dreams made true are waiting you ; ay, but for us ? We have 
only our bodies, and we dread the worms. No ; I did not 
kill myself. I took my vengeance. I made myself the love- 
liest thing the world has seen for ages. They all say so. 
Then I melted their hearts and broke them. I slew them 
with a hair of the dog that had torn me. Dear, do not judge 
me harshly. I took solace in the strength I had, — such 
strength as women like me have ; we share it with the snake 
and with the panther. Your God made snakes and panthers.” 

She paused. The boy was quiet ; his chest rose and fell 


SIGNA. 


393 


with painful breathing ; his lips were cold and white ; he was 
saying always to himself, — 

“ Who was the man — at first?” 

For he felt as if for Palma, and for poor dead merry Sandro, 
and for his own honor’s sake, the avenging of her ought to be 
his own work and no other’s. Had he not let her go with him 
that day, a little thoughtless child, over the hill and plain to 
Prato ? 

He pitied her from the bottom of his heart. 

He believed the tale she told. 

And he was sick with the giddiness of one who falls through 
drinking and from some great height. He lost his footing. 
He lost his hold upon the dreams and hopes of life. He was 
cast down from the pure simple certainty which never asked, — 

'‘And is there faith in heaven and is there love?” 

because he was so very sure of both. 

And now he was sure of nothing. 

“ God makes snakes and panthers.” 

Yes ; and God had let Gemma be made vile, with no fault 
in her, no sin or seeking of her own ; so he thought. 

He grew dizzy. He, who had said to Palma, for her sister’s 
sake, — 

“ Dear, pray always. Prayers are heard.” 

She watched him, reading him as easily as she would have 
read gold letters on a white page. 

By years their ages were the same, but she, in the world’s 
knowledge, already was so old, — so old ; and he, in his un-. • 
worldliness and ignorance, was yet so young. 

She knew the ways of men at their worst, their wisest, their 
best, their basest, and turned them over in her head as a child 
does the wooden letters of a mastered alphabet. 

He of woman knew hardly anything. 

“You hear my story now,” she said, with a soft sigh, at 
last. “ Signa, you loathe me ?” 

He shuddered a little. 

“ From my soul — "I pity you.” 

A sort of loathing was in him for her, but how could he 
say that ? Whatever she had become, she had once been the 
little Gemma that he had kissed in her rough bed of hay. 

R* 


394 


SIGNA. 


Her eyelids were cast down ; lie did not see the cold blue 
flame of anger burn in her eyes a moment as she heard. 

She is to be pitied ! she who, in her arrogance and her 
loveliness, thought she had the world to play with as a ball 
under her foot. 

She turned her eyes upon him without anger, sadly. 

“ So, you will leave me? You mean that?” 

He colored to his throat. 

“ You live still, by choice — in shame?” 

She could have laughed aloud. She could have dashed her 
hand against his mouth. She could have killed him, — almost ; 
but she said, turning her face from him, like one in pain of 
which she is ashamed, — 

“ What other life was left me ? Fling wool in mud, do you 
blame the fleece that it grows black ? I told you I took my 
vengeance. There was no other thing to do. You do not 
understand the world. I was so young, and men so cruel. 
Wrong made me all that I have been, but I am tired, — oh, so 
tired, Signa ; if you only knew ! A world of lovers, and not 
one single friend. The loveliest woman is not so desolate as 
I. Hear, I am vile, perhaps, and cold, and love luxury too 
well ; and if I were born with any heart in me, have killed it. 
That is what they say. I think it is quite true. There is no 
love anywhere for me. Love for me is the imperial beast that 
kissed and slew. Love : I laugh at the word, I dance on it, 
I spit at it. Judas loved ; — and that great empress who wal- 
lowed in the mire with her guards and slaves ? — what did they 
call her ? I never loved a living thing. How should I ? The 
only love that I have ever seen is a devouring beast with fire 
in his entrails and slime upon his mouth. That is the only 
love that ever comes to me. Hear, I am tired. When I saw 
your face last night, I said in my own thoughts, I will tell him 
all the truth ; he is not as the others are ; he was a baby with 
me in the old green garden ways ; he will understand ; he will 
have sorrow for me ; he will be true to me, when all are false ; 
he will be my saint, when all others are my swine ; he will 
despise me, lament for me, rebuke me ; yes, no doubt ; but he 
will not leave me utterly, — for the sake of the old days when 
we were children. That is what I thought. Oh, dear ! I was 
unwise and you are wise. Fly from me. There is no common 
ground between us. You cannot see in me the thing you used 


SIONA. 


395 


to play with. I am only a base light wanton woman, without 
charm for you and without pardon either from you or from 
your God. Dear, you are right. To see more of me could 
only bring you pain or get you evil names. Pure dreams are 
your fair portion. Foul facts are mine. Leave me. I would 
not have you stay, though you are all of home or heaven that 
I shall ever see in life. Go and tell Palma not to plead to 
Christ for me. Her words are wasted. I am in hell, though 
living ; let me be.” 

She rose as she spoke, and pushed him from her with a 
gesture of farewell. 

The consummate art of her took every hue and grace of 
nature ; her face was pale and cold ; down her cheeks tears 
rolled and dropped upon the laces on her breast. 

She knew the chords to touch in him ; she played on him 
as he could play on any lute or violin. 

She stung the generous sweetness of his nature ; she stirred 
all his tenderness of pity. 

Had he been cruel and self-righteous in his instincts of dis- 
gust ? Had he been unmanly and unfeeling, wounding a dis- 
honored woman, whose truthfulness had laid her open to his 
scorn ? 

A confused sense of being wrong to her oppressed him, and 
struggled with the natural impulse of his aversions, with his 
instinct never to look on her or be touched by her or hear the 
sound of her voice again. 

A nature generous and yielding, accused of meanness or 
selfishness, flew at a rebound to the unwisdom of self-sacrifice. 

“ I had no thought of myself,” he murmured, pierced to the 
quick. “But between us there is such a gulf; what can I do? 
what can I say ? 1 cannot see you lead this life and come to 

you and be in fellowship with the men who ruined you, or the 
men you fool ! To me you are — Gemma ; it is as if you were 
my sister. It is horrible. I do not know what to say to you. 
It seems to me we cannot be together now.” 

“ I said that you were right in saying so. Bight — for 
yourself. Go. Who keeps you, Signa? Not I. Go.” 

She spoke coldly, sadly ; he thought he heard in her the 
heart-sick resignation of a woman from whom all good is 
banished, yet who cleaves to it. 

The tender, unthinking, unwise ardor of his nature carried 


396 


SIGNA. 


him away ; he dropped before her on his knees as if she had 
been any saint or queen. His sweet and passionate voice 
thrilled with emotion. 

“ If I can serve, I wif not leave you,” he said. “ Gemma, 
listen to me. You are heart-sick of the wretched glories of 
your life. All the better nature in you is in rebellion at it. 
Leave it. Come home. You shall be to me as a sister. 
This horror shall be buried in our hearts. Throw your gold 
away; it brings the plague with it; strip your jewels off; keep 
nothing but the beauty that God gave you, and that you defile. 
Come back to the old hills, to the fresh air, to the green 
country ways, to the peaceful days and nights. Come back. 
Palma is there ; she will love you still. Her arms are strong 
enough, her faith is firm enough, to lift you out of hell. Hear, 
fling this horror from you, and trample on it, and leave men, 
and cling to Ged. I have some greatness. I can make 
enough to keep you safe from want. You shall be to me ever 
as if you were a sister, — lost and found. This beast you talk 
of, and that in your madness you call Love, shall never reach 
you nor hurt you there. Come home. Palma is poor and ig- 
norant, working for a crust, but she is strong in courage, and 
wiser than us all. She will suffer, but she will help you always. 
T look at you ; you blind me ; I do not know you. You seem 
to me one of those lovely lying things that Satan made and sent 
into the wilderness to tempt the saints. But if you are not 
that, — if indeed you ever were the little Gemma that ran with 
me in the summer dust that day, — come home. Oh, Gemma, 
Gemma ! if indeed you are the little child I played with, joy 
there never can be for you, dear, nor hope on earth, nor any 
love of any honest man, I know ; but Palma will not turn 
from you, nor I. It is too late to save your beauty from the 
lepers: it is plague-stricken; God himself cannot change that. 
But, Gemma, there is life beyond this life. I seem to speak 
so poorly, I cannot plead with you, — not as I would. But, 
Gemma, the soul in you is not dead. Cast off these riches 
that are viler than all rags, and lead a straight and simple life, 
and trust the rest to GoL Come home !” 

He spoke in all his innocence, knowing no better. 

A stray sunbeam shot across the shadow of the room, and 
fell on his fair upturned forehead and the misty radiance of 
his supplicating eyes. To him she was terrible ; to him she 


SIGNA. 


397 


was plague-stricken ; almost he thought her as he said, one of 
those beautiful accursed things the devil loosed on earth to 
tempt the minds of men in deserts, and sting their senses, and 
destroy their lives, and level them with the beasts that perish. 
Still, — if he could save her? He prayed with her for her- 
self, as in his childhood he had prayed for Satan to the angels, 
watching the sun shine beyond the Certosa towers. 

She listened, her beautiful golden head bent down, her color 
changing : do what she would, she could not keep the blood 
quite steady in her cheek. She was so deeply angered. Yet 
some pain smote her through all the jeweled armor of her 
tranquil self-content. 

Had she lost something, after all, that poor dull women, 
plodding for their bread, lived with and died with ? — had she 
missed something in all her plenteous harvest, were it only a 
vain vague fancy, worth the having ? 

She had princes and heroes, all greatness, at her feet, and 
all the soft care and peace and triumph that she craved ; yet 
for one instant the whole world seemed to grow as nothing to 
her if she had this boy’s scorn, this boy who had run with her 
over the brown fields of the hills through the autumn weather, 
when the crocus-cup and the dragon-weed had been the only 
gold they owned. 

He was a fool ; yet — some fools stand near to heaven. 

The tears scorched* her cheeks. Not such tears as she had 
summoned at her will a moment earlier, fair tricks of studied 
arts ; but quick, ’salt, bitter drops, that burned her as they fell. 

They angered her. The rage in her grew as much against 
herself as him. 

“ He shall know no heaven but me,” she said in her own 
heart. ‘‘ He shall live on my kiss, and die because he loses 
it. He is a fool, — a fool !” 

And yet — were she but such a fool ! 

For the moment she would have given all her empire to 
have been no wiser and no guiltier than he. 

He did not know. He only saw her cheek grow pale, her 
proud mouth tremble. 

“ You hear me ?” he murmured ; “ you will come ?” 

She was silent, mastering the rage within her and the new 
strange pain. The pain passed ; the rage lived. She said to 
herself, — 


34 


398 


SIGNA. 


“ There is no honesty upon my lips ? — well, he shall find 
some sweeter thing there, and get drunk on it.” 

She had meant to have sport with him. Well, sport with 
vengeance in it was the finer pastime. It was his fault. Why 
would he speak of her as of a thing he scorned ? To bring 
his babyish, monkish, womanish fancies here, of honor and 
shame, and heaven and sins, — sick phantasies from dying 
peasants’ psalters and priests’ penance-tales in Lent ! 

She gazed down on him with serious eyes. 

“ No ; I cannot come, Signa. You are good to me, but the 
things you dream of are not possible, — for me, at least. You 
do not understand. I should make Palma mad ; she me. I 
could no more go back to the old ways of life than you to a 
herd-boy’s empty days. Things cannot be undone. When a 
tree is grown, you may cut it down and burn it, but you can- 
not make it back into the acorn or the chestnut that it sprang 
from first. Palma thinks me safe with the saints ; so let her. 
For you, — you have your art, your fame, your certain growth 
of greatness. You can soon forget me. Dear, I fretted you 
and flouted you when we were children. That was all, I think, 
ever. It is but little to regret.” 

“ It is because I have no words to move you, to awake your 
soul ” 

“ If you were an angel from heaven you could say nothing 
that would change me. And do not think of any soul in me, 
Signa ; I have none. Has the butterfly any ? You are mad, 
Signa 1 I was an idle child, I am an idle woman. I love ease, 
luxury, riches, beauty. I toil ! I hunger and thirst, and spin 
and sew ! I plod after the oxen in the furrows ! II You are 
mad ! You are mad, I say !” 

His color rose. 

“ There would be no need to toil. It would be a poor and 
simple life ; yes, that is true. But I could make enough — I 
shall make more each year. All that I have should be for 
you. And it is honest money. Gemma, see, dear, I have 
always thought of you, and dreamed of you, and meant to seek 
you out and take you back and set you in the midst of every 
greatness I could get. When the great ladies courted me, I 
did not care for them. I thought, somewhere there is a little 
girl with golden curls I used to kiss ; for I forgot that you 
grew old as I did. When men talked of love to me, I would 


SIGN A. 


399 


say nothing, but I used to think, When I find Gremma 

Dear, that is over now. I cannot love you. You are a thing 
lost to me now forever. Men do not love such women as 
you are. You are divided from me ever. But you still are 
dear to me as if you were my sister. I would not touch your 
mouth with any kiss, for you have sold its kisses ; I would not 
take your hand in mine, for you have perjured it ; I would 
not, starving, break a crust of yours, for you are sold for it. ^ 
But I will labor for you all my life ; I will set away each coin 
I get for you ; I will never have any joy, or mirth, or love, in 
all my years, that I may work the better for you, and the oft- 
ener give you more. Dear, do not think it will be hard for 
me. You know I was reared hardly. I can live on nothing ; 
and I can pass by woman’s love and all that delights and leads 
away men most, because, in truth, the only thing I love is my 
great art. In this I have been given so much that I can easily 
renounce the rest. Dear, do not think that it will be anything 
to me. Men have lived so in monasteries, — lived and died 
happily. Gemma, if you will come back, — listen, — I swear 
to you I will dedicate all my life to yours. There is the shame 
of you between us two forever like a grave. But since you 
never can be anything to me more than the dead are, no other 
creature shall be anything : that I swear, too. Dear, listen ! 
After God and my music, you are most dear to me, — yes, even 
as you are. Let me work for you. Say you have no soul, as 
the rose has none ; yet when a rose has blossomed with us who 
can throw it in the sewer ? And you are wrong : a soul you 
have, for I have seen your tears. Oh, heaven ! What word 
can I find to tell you how utterly I mean the thing I say ? 
Gemma, if I had done right, and had refused to let you go 
with me that day to Prato, you would be living with your 
sister still, — an innocent, frank, happy, stainless thing ; and I 
should love you, and you would be all my own. This misery 
is of my act. I let you go that day. Your shame has come 
of it ; and I can never even kiss you, dear, because there is no 
honesty upon your lips. But take you out of your dishonor 
and save your soul, I can, — I will. Gemma, come back ; and 
let me give my life for yours. On earth you will not be 

happy, dear, — nay, never. But hereafter What can I 

say to make you trust me and believe?” 

The words poured from his lips, swift, eager, breathless. 


400 


SIGNA. 


unconsidered, in all their unreason, their unwisdom, their no- 
bility, their ignorance, their folly, their sublimity. All the 
narrow simplicity of the peasant, and all the boundless vision 
of the poet, met in him as he spoke. He meant, to their 
very uttermost, every syllable he uttered. 

She was gone from him ; she was to him a thing terrible, 
and almost’ loathsome. He burned with shame for her shame. 
Yet she was dear to him. He was ready to give his life to 
ransom hers. To him sin was real, and hell and heaven. 
What he dreamed of was impossible ; but in his sight it was 
possible. It seemed to him that the faith to do it was so 
strong in him that it could not fail to work its own fulfillment. 

She listened. 

As far as she could be touched by anything, she was moved 
by his suffering. It was strange to her ; it even amused her ; 
but it touched her. Poor boy ! He had always seen living 
things in lonely wayside stones ; and lamented for the birds 
and beasts, because the priests said there was no eternity for 
them ; and heard so many voices, that none else could ever 
hear, in the silent marshaling of the clouds by night, and the 
low whimper of the autumn-ruffled brooks. She remembered 
all those things. He had been always so foolish, — always. 

It amused her. Yet it hurt her a little — ever so little — 
very, very little — too. 

“ Who would have thought he would have taken it to heart 
like that?” she thought. And she felt a sort of sullen jeal- 
ousy in her. It was not for her that he suffered so much. 
Not for the real woman, as she knew herself. Not for the beau- 
tiful cold wanton whom Paris had called Innocence. It was for 
the playmate that had run with him thab summer day over the 
plains to Prato ; it was for the imaginary thing which she had 
built up before him with her words and dressed in her apparel 
of soft lies. 

She was almost jealous : as astrologists were of shapes their 
magic conjured. 

“ Signa, do not be so full of pain,” she murmured. “ It is 
no fault of yours.” 

“ Yes ; it is mine. I let you go with me that day,” he 
muttered. “ Oh, poor Palma ! — thinking of you night and 
morning, — thinking of you safe with Christ !” 

His head was bent down upon her knees, otherwise he 


SIONA. 


401 


would have seen her petulant, proud mouth curve in a little 
smile. 

She stretched her hand out, and musingly touched the soft 
curls of his hair. 

Pie shrank, as if the touch had burnt him. She saw the 
gesture of aversion. It set her heart harder on the thing she 
meant to do. 

“ You shudder from me,” she said, sadly. “ Well, that is 
natural, no doubt. But it is better to lose you from the truth 
than keep you by a lie. I tell a million lies. All women do. 
But there is something in your eyes that will not let one lie. 
What is it?” 

Lying all the while, she kept her hand upon his curls, 
stroking them gently, till, magnetized by the contact, he no 
longer moved away or strove to resist that touch, but looked 
down with his cheeks on fire and his pulse beating. 

“ I do not understand,” he muttered. “ I see two simple 
ways, — one right, one wrong. I would save you with my life ; 
—I say, with my soul ; — only you laugh at that.” 

“ Nay, I do not laugh ; for you, — ^you are of the things 
God makes to live forever, — if he makes anything. I laugh 
when you talk of soul or mind in me. A woman has a body 
and a face ; no more. She has ten years’ grace with them, 
and glory ; then she is withered up and shoved aside, and 
there is an end of all. I would make the most of my ten years. 
What harm?” 

He looked at her in a blank despair. How could he give 
sight to what was blind ? — how make her shamed for what she 
did not see ? 

“Leave me alone,” she said. “What matter? It is but 
such a little while a woman lives. With the first wrinkle on 
her skin, she dies. As well fret for each rose that falls each 
time it rains, I tell you. Signa, why stay to pain yourself and 
me ? You cannot change me. Go back to your own hills, and 
dream your music there, and pray to all the saints with Palma, 
— if it please you.” 

“ Palma ! What is she to me ?” 

He rose and stood irresolute, impatient, bewildered. Go, 
and leave her ! He felt as he had felt in the garden of Giovoli, 
hearing her laughter on the other side of the wall as she was 
swung by other hands than his up in the golden fruit-boughs. 

U* 


402 


SIGNA. 


His face was burning ; his heart was beating ; his brain was 
giddy ; he had spoken in all the earnestness of pain and truth. 
It seemed to him that she must loathe her life. It seemed 
to him that she must hate herself. He -had spoken in full 
faith. He would have surrendered up his future years to hers, 
and served her faithfully forever parted from her. 

But then she did not seem to see 

The passion of his sorrow fell back from her, as hot tears 
may fall back from the red smoothness of a rose-leaf. 

She leaned backwards on the cushions of her couch ; her 
hands were tightly clasped behind her head ; her wide sleeves 
fell back from her arms to the shoulder ; her face was turned 
upward, with her blue eyes watching him through half-closed 
lids ; her small scarlet mouth was but half shut, her breath 
came through it evenly as a child’s ; she smiled a little. 

It maddened him to look on her. 

He could not stir one pulse of shame in her. 

He could only — leave her. 

So she said. 

Had he been older, harder, wiser, he would have left her 
then, without an effort to change the unchangeable, to pierce 
the impenetrable ; or he would have tossed her away from him 
with such scorn, such force, such loathing, that, finding her 
master in him, the cowardice which sleeps in every woman 
would have awakened in her and brought her trembling to his 
feet. But he was not old, nor hard, nor wise ; his heart was 
weak with all the innocent affection of his childhood, and for 
the first time the loveliness of a woman made him blind and 
stupid. She was so much to him : she was Gemma, whom he 
had kissed a thousand times in babyhood, tumbling in the 
flower-filled grasses of the green hill-sides ; and she was also 
the first woman whose look sent fire through his veins. She 
was near to him by a host of sinless memories ; and she was 
sundered from him so utterly by sins so vile. 

The world held nothing for him but herself. 

To cleanse her from her golden corruption, to shake her 
conscience from its drugged apathy, to tear her away from the 
companions of her life, — to do all this and save her for the 
eternity that he believed in, the boy would have given up his 
own life and his own soul. 

All in a moment his art perished. 


SIGNA. 


403 


Wlien a human love wakes, it crushes fame like a dead 
leaf, and all the spirits and ministers of the mind shrink away 
before it, and can no more allure, no more console, but, sighing, 
pass into silence and are dumb. 

She, lying back with her golden head on her clasped hands, 
watched him. 

She knew all he felt. 

“ Leave me,” she said, with a slow soft smile. “ You have 
your music and the saints that you believe in, and Palma, who 
will pray with you. Why do you stay here ? Go.” 

“ I cannot go,— not so.” 

She stung him with Palma’s name ; poor, stupid, unlearned, 
barefoot Palma, treading the earth as the ox did and the mule. 

“Gemma, have you no conscience in you? no pain, no 
sorrow, no revolt against your fate ?” he said, suddenly. “ Oh, 
my dear ! have I spoken to the winds ? Is it because my 
words are weak that what I plead for seems so too ? Gemma, 
I cannot leave you to your fate. It is to leave you to drink 
poison as the very water of life, and to die a dog’s death at 
the end of all, — a street-dog’s, kicked and cursed. You speak 
of Palma. Plow can I look in Palma’s face, leaving her sister 
lost as you are lost ? The very hills there would rebuke me, 
the very stones at home cry out. Oh, God 1 What shall I 
say? If He put no soul in you, how shall I?” 

She listened to the generous, foolish, noble, senseless words. 
Some of them stung her like thorns ; some of them moved 
her with wonder. He seemed to her such a fool, — ah, heaven ! 
such a fool. He spoke as children dream. Yet, innocently, 
he lashed her with a scourge of nettles ; for he rejected her with 
all his infinite tenderness ; for he spoke of her as of a lost, 
degraded, alien thing ; for he would not set his kiss upon her 
lips. 

She rose on an impulse of rage to send him from her for- 
ever ; — he would not touch her ! She, who saw princes sue 
and lords in feud for her, could have thrust her foot at him 
and spurned him from her presence in her fury at his inno- 
cently uttered scorn. 

When the heart is fullest of pain and the mouth purest 
with truth, there is a cruel destiny in things which often makes 
the words worst chosen and surest to defeat the end they seek. 

Each added word of his hardened more and more her will 


404 


SIQNA. 


upon the course that she had set herself ; stung all her warmest 
pride, and made more sure his doom with her. 

No angel from heaven, no miracle of light shining as in the 
steps of Paul, could ever have changed her much ; but he, in 
all his innocence, struck the iron of her willful vanity and 
beat it into sharpest steel. 

She rose erect on to her feet, and thrust back the white 
wooden shutters before the casement nearest her, and let the 
dazzling effulgence of the intense noonlight pour on her, and 
bathe her in it, and turn the fairness of her hair to molten gold, 
the whiteness of her flesh to ivory, the flush of her cheeks to 
opal fires ; her beautiful limbs shone in it like marble, her hair 
streamed against it till it was like an aureole of heaven. The 
ruthless light glanced on her and searched her everywhere, and 
found no flaw. Flowers droop in it ; children pale in it ; birds 
flee from it ; but she bore it in all its intensity, and was but 
the more glorious in it. 

He gazed at her. She stood erect, golden and white against 
the burning sun. 

“ Look at me !” she cried to him. “ Look ! the light that 
kills all other things and pales all other beauties does but make 
mine the greater. Look at me ! The sun may shine on me, 
search me, pierce me, it can find no fault anywhere. Look — 
look — look ! There is no blemish anywhere, I say — no flaw 
the sun can find. And you talk to me of penitence and pain ! 
You talk to me of poverty and shame ! You talk to me of 
going back to penance in a peasant’s hut and letting rains and 
winds and snows beat on my body ! Look at me ! While I 
am this, you think I care for heaven? You are mad ! Un- 
lovely loveless women may cling to priestly tales of it, as 
hungry curs hope, shivering, for a bone. I give it with an 
hour of myself Gods themselves can do no more than I !” 

The mighty blasphemy of her superb vanity seemed to him 
to burn through the golden light she stood in, as lightning 
through the sunbeams. 

With her arms uplifted in the exultation of her measure- 
less arrogance, and her eyes with contemptuous challenge 
glancing through their amorous drooped lids, a sudden memory 
struck him. 

He cried aloud, as if some mortal hurt were done him in 
the flesh, — 


SIGNA. 


405 


“You were the dancer of Istriel ! You are the creature 
they call Innocence !” 

She looked him in the eyes straightly and serenely, her 
golden head erect under the nimbus of the noonday light. 

“Yes. Well, then? — what of that?” 

He gazed at her breathless ; a great tearless sob choked 
him ; then he fell down senseless at her feet. 

When he came to himself he was alone upon a bed in a 
darkened chamber. The wind was blowing over him ; he 
heard birds singing. 

Long fasting, sleeplessness, and violent emotion, all had 
made him lose his consciousness for a while ; his brain was 
giddy still, the light swam before his eyes ; he rose and stag- 
gered to the glass doors which stood open, and put the outer 
shutters aside, and went out into the air. 

An old negress stopped him. Was he not too ill ? Would 

he not wait ? Her mistress At the last word he put her 

hurriedly aside and hastened farther out ; it was the house of 
this woman whom her world called — as the emperor his desert 
beast — Innocence. He could not stay in it; the air of it 
seemed to stifle him. 

Without well knowing what he did, he traversed the gar- 
dens with unsteady steps, the sunshine reeling and dancing 
before his half-blind eyes ; then, his limbs growing stronger 
and his sight clearer as the wind blew on him from the 
water, he pushed his way through the maze of flowering 
shrubs and thick-set orange-trees out of the gardens down on 
to the shore. He sat down stupidly in the shadow of a boat 
and leaned his forehead on his hands, and, do what he would, 
saw only her — standing against the light. 

She was the dancer of Istriel. 

“ Well, what of that?” she had asked him. 

What of it, indeed ? It made her neither better nor worse. 
It changed nothing. To have been the nude model of a painter 
was not more than to have been the willing wanton of the world. 

Yet it seemed more hideous to him. 

It brought her vileness home to him. 

It seemed to write her shame on earth and sky, as on a 
scroll for every eye to read. 

This was a fancy ; but the fancies of poets are their hell 
when they cease to be their heaven. And they cease so soon. 


406 


SIGNA. 


The dancer of Istriel had been seen by all the nations of 
the globe ; that lovely, voluptuous, smiling thing, with her red 
blossom and her floating feet, had looked all mankind in the 
face and made them wish for her ; to the boy she seemed sold 
to the whole earth, — made harlot for all the peoples of the 
world. 

Istriel’s gold had bought his Rusignuolo. Istriel’s gold had 
purchased Gemma. 

He owed his fame — she her ruin — to the same hand. So 
he thought. He exaggerated his own debt, and he shut his 
eyes against her lie, as such natures as his will ever do, to hurt 
themselves and keep their faith in their false gods. 

Where was Istriel ? 

In an aimless, hopeless passion, he longed to And this man, 
— this man who had taken her in her youngest youth and 
drawn every curve and colored every hue of her fair frame so 
cruelly, and sent it out to let the eyes of all men gloat on it in 
public as they would. The crime of the painter against her 
seemed to him viler than all seduction. It seemed to him the 
very brutality of license, the very crown of outrage. The 
seducer fed but his own eyes with the beauty he unveiled ; 
this man had fed ten million ravishers’ eyes with hers. 

It was the flrst passionate agony of his life. He had suf- 
fered before ; but then with hope underneath him, bearing him 
up like the wings of some strong bird. He suffered now as 
those do who suffer without hope. 

All these years gone, and Palma praying there in an un- 
doubting faith, and all the while nothing on earth or heaven 
heeding ; but all this vileness done beyond recall, beyond repair. 

Ho what he would, he could not change this thing the years 
had made her. 

Cry as he would to fate, no means could undo what had 
been done. 

Nothing could give him back Gemma, — little fair Gemma, 
with unstained soul, sleeping as the lambs sleep in the bed of 
hay. And yet the loveliness of her burned him like so much 
flame. 

He hid his face in his hands, and saw her always as he had 
seen her come out from the water in the dark night among the 
red roses. 

'• Go write a romance on me,” she had said to him. But 


SIGN A. 


407 


he could no more have done it than he could have flown to the 
sun with the eagles. 

His art seemed dead in him. 

He heard no longer sweet concord in the waters and lisped 
numbers in the murmurs of the winds ; he looked back at his 
self of yesterday and wondered where the power in him had 
gone ; all in a moment his art and his fame and all his higli 
desires seemed to grow as nothing to him. 

He shut his eyes, and saw the fair limbs of a woman slowly 
moving through the shadows ; a mouth that smiled a little, a 
bough of dark leaves and ruby buds against a snow-white 
breast : — that was all he saw. 

His art : — where was it? 

It seemed to him like a dead thing. A sudden sense of 
vast immeasurable loss fell on him. 

He was terrified ; he did not know what ailed him. 

In men and women Love waking wakes with himself the soul. 

In poets Love waking kills it. 

Nature had been always to the boy so full of sympathy and 
solace. Beaten and hungry and overtasked in his childhood, 
he had been happy the moment that he had escaped alone into 
the open air on the breeze-blown hill-paths, with the sighing 
of the pines above his head ; nay, happy even if he could but 
be by any little narrow casement and see the line of the old 
town wall with the lichens and vetches clear against the sky 
and in their crevices the shining lizards sitting. But now 
mountain and lake and the autumnal glories of the woods 
could bring no consolation ; they only seemed to him cruel ; 
they had no heart in them, they did not care. 

The hideous universal sentence of corruption for the first 
time seemed to him written over all the things of earth and air. 

For she was vile. 

How the day passed he never knew. 

It rolled away somehow; the sky seemed like a sheet of 
fire ; the sun for the first time burned him and hurt him ; he 
saw nothing but the form of a woman. 

The man who had his opera at the town sought him, and 
said, — 

“ Only think ! they will play your Lamia at the Apollo in 
Rome in Carnival. Only think ! — and at San Carlo too. 
Here are your letters.” 


408 


SIGNA. 


He stared at the speaker, and thrust the papers away, and 
did not answer. 

He hardly understood. 

His music ? 

It had been his religion. He was dead to it now. All in 
a day his innocent spiritual joys were withered up in him. 
What use was it ? It could not alter her. 

In proportion to the absorption of any life in any art, so is 
the violence of its dethronement and oblivion of art when love 
has entered. 

It seemed to him that every note in all the world might be 
forever mute, and he not care. 

It seemed to him that if they said he was a fool and let him 
die nameless and despised, it would be no matter to him. 

For he loved this fair foul thing ; only he did not know it. 

After a while mechanically he found his way into his own 
chamber. 

It was late in the day. The little room was filled with 
flowers that the village women, proud of having the young 
genius in their midst, had placed everywhere about. He did 
not notice them. But at the intense odor he shuddered a little ; 
they made him think of the garden ways of Giiovoli. 

Without knowing what he did, he sat down to the piano 
which stood there. 

He began to play. 

A torrent of passion, a passion of tears, was in the music 
that he made with no sense of what he did ; the abruptest 
changes from pain to rapture, the strongest and greatest har- 
monies, the most capricious transitions, the most bitter woe, 
were in the sounds he drew ; never in all his creations had he 
reached so great a height as now, when he created what he did 
not care to preserve, what he had no brain left to measure. 

By sheer instinct his nature cried aloud against its pain in 
the art that was inborn in him as its song in a bird. 

Then all at once he ceased and loathed it: what use was it? 
it was only a mockery ; it could not alter her. 

Some of those who followed him and worshiped him, — for 
he was never now without some of these parasites of success, 
— standing outside his door, listened breathless in ecstasy ; one 
or two, when the melody ceased, ventured in and kissed his 
hands, and cried to him, — 


SIONA. 


409 


“ You never were so great !” 

He looked at them dully. 

“ What good is it ?” he said to them ; and he went into his 
inner room and barred the door against them. 

What good was it ? 

He was scarcely more than twenty years old ; he had a great 
future ; he had put his name in all the mouths of men ; he 
had all that, dreaming under the pines above Bruno’s house 
the night when the violin was broken, he had thought would 
be worth purchase by a whole long life of toil and poverty and 
renunciation and neglect. 

And all was unreal and useless to him now. It seemed as 
if his hands grasped ashes and his ears were full of the sound 
of empty winds mourning through desolate places. 

He went out in the air again. 

He could not rest in-doors. 

He shook himself free, with impatience, of his disciples, 
who would fain have accompanied him and spoken to him ot 
the coming reception of his operas down in Borne. He got 
away by himself to the shore of the lake; to the still and 
sombre shadows of a long-deserted garden that had been his 
haunt in happier hours. 

There are times when the weakness of humanity falls back 
broken and heart-sick before the iron wall of unchangeable 
circumstance, as a beaten seabird falls back from the stone 
face of the clilFs. 

It was so with him now 

“If only I could save her!” he cried in his heart, and in 
his heart knew that he could not, — not though he were to 
give his soul up for her own. Legends tell of such barters. 
Life does not know them. 

Gemma had been her own destiny. But such destiny was 
as immutable as though the gods of old had shaped it. 

She had stained her white marble red. Signa knew that 
though the stone should be washed seventy times seven and 
bruised into a million fragments, the dust would be never 
white again, but blood- red always, — always. 

He had uttered his real thoughts to Gemma: to him she 
was like one leprous-stricken. Her story had filled him with 
pity, but with horror. 

Bruno had taught him to hold wanton women accursed. 

B 35 


410 


SIONA. 


Bruno, who again and again had fallen in their snares, had 
always bidden him hold them like the deadly mushrooms that 
men gather for bread and find are death. Bruno, fearing the 
softness of the boy’s nature, had said always to him, “ Poverty 
is bad, and hunger and sickness and sorrow and labor that has 
no end, — these are all bad ; but worse than any of these is it 
to be the slave of a woman who is unchaste.” 

He wandered all the day. It seemed to him as if it would 
never end. He saw nothing but the face of Gemma. The 
world which had seemed to him so beautiful was changed ; 
heaven was cruel. It created loveliness only to pollute it and 
deform it afterwards. 

Gut of his dreams he was brought face to face with facts 
that sickened him. All the old land-marks of his faith were 
gone. All the happy hopefulness of his nature was crushed. 
He was bewildered and sick at heart. And through it all he 
could not thrust away the personal beauty of the woman. 
Her gaze, her form, her breath, her smile, her sigh, — he could 
think of no other thing. It seemed to him as if she were in 
the air, in the clouds, in the water ; her voice rang in his ears ; 
she was so lovely, — and yet she was so vile; she was so much 
more than a woman, and so much less. “ If only I could save 
her !” he said to himself, and then could have flung his fore- 
head on the rock, remembering that there was no way to make 
her other than she was ; remembering that to be torn from 
shame is not to become innocent. 

“ Oh, dear God, all Palma’s prayers !” he thought. They 
had been all in vain, like so much futile breath spent on the 
empty air to corresponding space. 

The mockery of it stung him, as if God himself were jeering 
as a man might do. 

He looked up stupidly at the broad noonday skies. There 
was the same sun, the same earth, the same water ; beyond the 
plains on the hills that he knew best, men and women were 
leading the same life, sharing the wine from the presses, draw- 
ing the oxen over the green sods, gathering up the ripe olives, 
with the bells ringing over their quiet world. It seemed to 
him so strange. Everything was unchanged except himself, 
and he seemed to have become old, and tired, and full of pain. 

Only one night before there had been no happier living 
thing in all the human world than he ; and now — he wondered 


SIGNA. 


411 


that the sun did not stay in its course, that the waters did not 
rise and cover the land, that all the flowers were not withered 
off" the ground, — since sin so covered the earth. 

The hours rolled by ; he did not count them. The long 
hot day burned itself out, as passing passions do. The boats 
came and went ; the sun sank, and the moon rose. His own 
stars — the stars of the Winged Horse — shone down in the first 
faint darkness of the early night. 

He sat lonely on the solitary shore, watching the breeze- 
blown water, without sense of what he saw. 

He could not understand the anguish that blotted out for 
him all favors of earth and heaven. 

All life had been to him as the divining-rod of Aaron, 
blooming ever afresh with magic flowers. Now that the flame 
of pain and passion burned it up, and left a bare sear brittle 
bough, he could not understand. 

Love is cruel as the grave. 

The poet has embraced the universe in his visions, and heard 
harmony in every sound, from deep calling through the darkest 
storm to deep, as from the lightest leaf dancing in the summer 
wind ; he has found joy in the simplest things, in the nest of 
a bird, in the wayside grass, in the yellow sand, in the rods of 
the willow ; the lowliest creeping life has held its homily and 
solace, and in the hush of night he has lifted his face to the 
stars, and thought that he communed with their Creator and 
his own. Then — all in a moment — Love claims him, and there 
is no melody anywhere save in one single human voice, there 
is no heaven for him save on one human breast ; when one face 
is turned from him there is darkness on all the earth ; when 
one life is lost, let the stars reel from their courses and the 
world whirl and burn and perish like the moon ; nothing 
matters : when Love is dead there is no God. 

Signa sat by the wind-tossed lake-waters. 

He did not know what had killed his soul in him. He only 
knew that his music was no more to him than the sound of 
stones shaken in a shriveled bladder by an idiot’s hand. 

Bruno was avenged. 

“ Give me to the worms : let only my music live !” he had 
said again and again in his one prayer to Fate. Now — wha 
use was his fame or his art to him ? They could not und 
what was done. 


412 


STGNA. 


Achievement holds its mockery, no less than failure. 

The evening deepened ; the stars of Pegasus grew clearer ; 
a lovely silvered radiance spread over the face of the waters 
and the sides of the mountains. He had no sight for it, and 
no care. He sat where he had wandered, the hill-thyme under 
his feet, gold-fruited boughs above his head, the lake before him. 

Through the soft gloom a white form stole towards him, a 
rose against her lips, as Silence has, to hide her smiles. 

She came and watched him a moment, and then laid her 
hands on his bent head. 

“ You went away without a word to me,” she said. “ I have 
looked for you since sunset, Signa.” 

He trembled from head to foot, and sprang erect, and stood 
and gazed at her. 

She waited a little while, then sank on the rough stone seat 
hewn out of a fallen rock where he had sat. 

“Well?” she said, softly. “Have you nothing to say’to 
me? — nothing? 

“ What can I say ?” he muttered. “ I wound you, I hurt 
you, — or I seem a fool.” 

“ A noble fool,” she said. “ Such fools as heaven is peopled 
with, if the saints’ tales be true.” 

His face flushed with the joy of her praise. Yet what was 
any praise of hers worth ? — what value any word ? 

Her words were as the tinkling cymbals of brass which lead 
men to destruction. Her beauty was bare to all the world as 
Phryne’s on the canvas of Gerome. 

He had been reared in the stern judgments of the old Dante 
temper which still lived in the recesses of the hill, — the temper 
which flung the nude marble and the voluptuous image in the 
flames at Savonarola’s bidding. 

“ Why did you go away — so ?” she said to him. “ I left 
you for a moment with my woman, and when I went back you 
had fled, no one knew where.” 

“ Knowing what I know, your house stifles me.” 

“ That is how you repay me for the truth. I should have 
lied to you.” 

“ You have let him paint the truth in scarlet letters for all 
the world to read.” 

“ Istriel ! Oh, that is so long ago !” 

“ He was your betrayer ?” 


SIONA. 


413 


“ What does it matter ?” 

“ He was ?” 

“ What does it matter ? I say ; I have forgotten him. He 
is far away painting in the Ukraine, waiting for the great 
snows, they say, to draw the forests and the wolves. Perhaps 
the wolves will eat him. Let him be. He painted me in a 
hundred ways. The first thing he did was of me standing like 
a little saint holding a dove and with those white roses that 
we call of the Madonna: he named the picture Innocence; 
that is how I had the name.” 

“ He is in the snow-fields, you say, — now ?” 

“ I heard so ; yes. What does it matter ? What would 
you do if he were here ?” 

He only looked at her. His face was very pale ; his great 
eyes had an answer in them that she understood. > 

She laughed a little to herself. 

“You would kill him ? Poor Istriel ! Why ? Since I did 
not?” 

“You would have done if ” 

“ If I had been Palma ?” 

She laughed again ; aloud this time. 

“ If you had been — a woman — as God made them.” 

“ How is that ? God made Eve — if He made anything. Do 
not use phrases, Signa. You learned that of your priests. 
You will die in a monk’s robes after all !” 

He turned from her with an inexpressible pain. 

“ Oh, my God ! You can jest !” 

“ Why not, dear? All my life is a jest. It goes merrily 
like bells. You will not understand.” 

“I will not believe! You cannot be so base.” 

“In a man it were philosophy; why in a woman is it 
baseness ?” 

“ You play with words ! if you be happy, why say a few 
hours since you were in hell ?” 

A faint smile broke across her face. She banished it before 
he saw it there. 

“You know women so little, if you ask that. We are in 
hell one hour and in heaven the next. ‘Flower of an Hour.’ 
That is a woman. I am happy, — very happy, — when you 
will not make me think.” 

He looked up at her again. 

35 * 


414 


SIGNA. 


“ Ah ! if you would but think, — but- let your conscience 
wake.” 

“ We said enough of that,” she interrupted him, with 
coldness. “To-day 1 answered you, once and for all. If 
you want conscience, and terror of the saints, and all you call 
true womanhood, you have it in Palma, — whom you leave 1 
As for me, I told the truth to you, judging you other than 
you are. I thought that you were fair enough, tender enough, 
sinless enough yourself to stay with me a little for our child- 
hood’s sake, without reproach. I have lovers where I will. 
I have no friend. Because I am no hypocrite, and will not 
take up at a moment’s bidding sackcloth and ashes, and say 
the seven psalms of penitence, you shudder and leave me to my 
fate. You have no patience, no reason, no compassion. You 
cast me off because I am not ready to go back to the old, hate- 
ful, bitter, famished life, and say my ‘ culpa mea’ at the feet of 
Palma. You are mad. And do not speak to me of sorrow. 
If you had sorrow for me, you would say, ‘ This woman is alone 
in all her wealth, desolate in all her power, without a heart to 
trust amidst a troop of lovers.’ You would say, ‘ There is a gulf 
between us, yes, but I will serve her still. I will not forsake 
her because she does not pile the cinders of a false repentance 
on her head ; I will have more faith in the later strength of 
patient purpose to win her back from error.’ That is what 
you would say, were you indeed the gentle boy I thought you. 
But you are like all the rest who imitate the saints. Tender- 
ness with you means flattered vanity ; you speak of your gods 
and act but for yourselves ; you think you arm yourself with 
virtue, but your strength is only your own self-love sharp- 
wounded and irate. You preach to me; you bid me leave my 
world ; you say you best had never seen my face again ; and 
why? Because you hate my sins? Ah, no! Because you 
hate my lovers!” 

His face flushed scarlet ; he sprang to his feet. 

The brutal truth, which yet was only half a truth, and bore 
rankest injustice with it, pierced him to the quick. 

There were honor, fair faith, and purity of intent in him, 
which flung off the words, in honest rage, as calumny. Yet, 
like all words that lay bare any truth, they had the electric 
shock of lightning in them. Passionate repudiation sprang 
to his lips, then paused there ; he was silent. 


SIONA. 


415 


Was it less her sins he loathed than those who shared them ? 

He searched his heart in vain ; all seemed dark there. He 
stood indignant, yet abashed. He knew her words a lie ; yet 
were his own all truth ? He did not know. He was a mys- 
tery to himself. 

To himself; but not to her. She watched him, knowing 
each pang that moved him, knowing each doubt that stunned 
him and confused him. The lovers of her world, though often 
their passion was high and their emotions violent, could give 
her no such sport as this young soul which had dwelt in solitude 
with art and God, and was bewildered in the maze of passions 
that she dragged it to, as any antelope caught in the hunter’s 
toils, when the forest is ablaze with torches and alive with 
steel. 

“ You do me cruel wrong, God knows,” he said, simply, 
and so turned and would have left her then forever. 

He knew she wronged him ; but how much — how little — 
that he could not tell ; he was sure no longer of himself, nor 
of anything, human or divine. 

“ What !” she said, slowly. “ You cannot even forgive me, 
then ?” 

He sighed from the depths of his heart. 

“ I do forgive you — everything. But who is to know the 
thing you really are? You seem so vile and soulless, all one 

moment, and the next Ah, let me go ! It kills me to be 

here. Perhaps I hate your lovers, as you say. Perhaps. 
Your brothers would.” 

A dark scorn gathered in her eyes. He — who had felt 
her hand among his hair, and on his drooping brow — could 
speak so ! 

“ My brothers ! they would be glad enough if I gave them 
gold to spend at loto, and new wine to drink, as far as I re- 
member them, — which is but little. They bit and pinched 
me ; and I stole figs and nuts to bribe them with, if ever I 
wanted them. If you have no better thing to say than quote 
my brothers ! ” 

“Say what I will, you quarrel with it. Gemma, — if you be 
Gemma ; sometimes still I, think you cannot be, — let me go !” 

“ I am not Gemma. Gemma was a little stupid child, fed 
on black bread and tumbling with the pig. I am Innocence, 
— the Innocence of Paris.” 


416 


SIQNA. 


And she lai.ghed. 

The laughter was like ice, and made him shiver, flesh and 
bone. 

What had she not known, what had she not done, what 
brutalities of license had not she bent to in willing bondage, 
what cruelties and luxuries of vice had she not tasted, in- 
vented, been prodigal of, what memories had she not, what 
horrors must she not have steeped her fair white beauty in, — 
he thought of all that, hotly, dully, as a drunken man will 
think of things that forever pursue him and yet are always 
vague to him. 

The moonlight was about her; the crimson amaranthus 
flung its tall feathers round her ; some marble sculptures shone 
behind her in the dark leaves of olive and of orange. She 
was so perfect to look on ; no sculptor ever made a fairer 
Clytie for the God of Song: and what had her life been? 
what were her memories? what was her foul knowledge? 
She was like the casket of silver that held the ashes of death. 

It broke his heart to look on her. 

To others she might be only one fair false woman the more, 
gone the way that all loose women take. But to him she was 
the very ruin of earth, the very mockery of heaven. 

He clasped her hands with a great cry : ‘‘ Oh, Gemma I 
have you no pity ?” 

Had she any ? 

She looked at him, thinking for the moment that she would 
be pitiful, and let him go, — go, whilst there was yet time ; 
while she could still become to him a thing seen in a trance, a 
phantom soon forgotten, a mere name ; go, whilst the horror 
in him was stronger than the love. 

He was only a score of years old ; he heard beautiful things 
in his dreams ; he was loved by the people and cherished ; 
his future would be greater than his present ; he had the semi- 
divinity of genius; he had the virgin gold of an unworn 
heart ; he had the fond mad faith of a poet : if she let him 
go there was still time, time for him to leave in peace, forget- 
ting her, in his art, as a feverish dream of the night is for- 
gotten in the breaking of morning. 

Would she have pity? it was but one plaything forborne, 
one leaf of the laurel ungathered. But she had said to her- 
self, “ Palma shall die of want of him, and I will be his god.” 


SIGN A, 


417 


She said it again in her heart. 

As much of warmth as she could know, stirred in her to- 
wards him. 

His beauty, his youth, his very innocence had a charm for 
her, such as sated Faustina or wearied Messalina might have 
found in some fliir boy captive from Judea, with the simple 
asceticism of the Gralilean fishers in his soul. And then he 
rebuked her, shrank from her, condemned her : it was enough. 

In the days of their infancy she had done with him as she 
chose; should he be stronger than she was now? 

He cleaved to his art and his faith ; well, he should forswear 
both. 

He was a little shell off the sea-shore that Hermes had 
taken out of millions like it that the waves washed up, and 
had breathed into, and had strung with fine chords, and had 
made into a syrinx sweet for every human ear. 

Why not break the simple shell for sport ? She did not 
care for music. Did the gods care, they could make another. 

“Have I no pity?'’ she murmured. “Nay, you only 
dream : dreams are pale, cold things at best : learn with me 
to live !” And she drew her hands from him and passed 
them round his throat, and inclined his head towards her 
breast, and brought his lips to hers. 

“ Have I no pity ?” she said. 

His life passed into her life. His soul went from him and 
became her own. 


CHAPTER XLV. 

It was a soft, clear winter in the country round the Lastra. 

On Christmas-day the wind-flowers were still rosy and 
purple and snow-white in the grass of the fields ; and, with 
the new year, the red roses blossomed behind the iron bars of 
the casements, and in the corn-fields the crocuses were think- 
ing that it was already time to come through the earth. Girls 
plaited at the doors on the mild mornings, as if it were sum- 
mer ; and there was seldom a curl of wood-smoke on the air, 
except when the soup-pots were simmering. ^ 

s* 


418 


SIGNA. 


Men coming and going from the city, and post-bags dropped 
as the letter-cart ran down over the bridge from the upper 
town, brought tidings in the soft, silvery weather of the Actea 
and the Lamia. 

In all the cities one or the other was being given ; north 
and south, under the Alps, and by the sea-shore of Vesuvius, 
they were playing and singing the music of the young master, 
who called himself by the old historic word of “ Signa.” 

“ What name will you take for the great world ?” they had 
said to him, when he was still but a little scholar. 

“ Only Signa,” he had said ; and he signed all that he 
wrote so. 

“ My mother was the flood, and my father the owls,” he 
said to himself ; he liked best to have it so ; dead Pippa was 
a pain to him ; and her lover, whoever he had been, whether 
prince or peasant, had no hold on his thoughts. “ I am 
Signa,” he said ; that was all his own, owing no man anything 
for it, nor the Church either. Signa, just as the walls were, 
and the gates, and the bells, and the woods, and the old painted 
frescoes. 

Everywhere they were playing and singing his music, and 
it had even echoed over the Alps, and spread itself northward 
and southward, in that victory of the lyre with which his coun- 
try has so often avenged herself for the invasions of the sword. 

His music was in the throats of the people. 

In grim Perugia, in dark Bologna, in smiling Como, in 
grand Ravenna, in the City of the Sirens, in the busy marts 
of Milan, in sombre, obscure Etruscan towns, in mighty opera- 
houses, in little solitary theatres, anywhere and everywhere the 
melodies of the Actea and the Lamia were ringing ; they had 
the pure science which allures the cultured ear, and the potent 
sympathies which sway the multitudes ; learned doctors fol- 
lowed their accurate combinations with delight in the solitude 
of the study, and boys and girls caught their sweet simplicity 
with rapture, and sang them to the woods and fields, as birds 
their love-calls. 

The Actea and the Lamia were sisters and rivals both at 
once : the Asiatic slave, with her crueified god and her mur- 
dered master, and the Venus of the Jelute, with her crowned 
passion and her divine honors, divided betweien them the adula- 
tion of the people. 


SIONA. 


419 


Some found noblest the sacrificed love, some the victorious ; 
some the dishonored grave that held the world for Actea, some 
the imperial art that rendered Lamia stronger than her tyrant; 
but whether one or the other, or whether both together, the 
two stories, old as the cities of the world are old, fresh as love 
is fresh, took hold upon the souls of the people, and by the 
interpretation of his harmonies thrilled the world anew, as 
Rome had trembled when Actea had wept, and Athens when 
Lamia had stayed the lifted sword. 

There is a chord in every human heart that has a sigh in it 
if touched aright. 

When the artist finds the key-note which that chord will 
answer to in the dullest as in the highest, then he is great. 

Signa had found it. 

Found it by the instinct which men call genius, not knowing 
what else to say. 

To the quiet Lastra, with the corn springing about it, and 
the smell of the pines coming down on the wind, and the fish- 
ermen throwing their nets in the full waters, tidings of these 
great triumphs of the little fellow who had run barefoot among 
them came every now and then, written in letters, spelled out 
of news-sheets, and oftener still brought by the mouths of men 
coming from the little fairs of the towns, or the grain-markets 
of the city. 

They played the Actea in the city itself before Christmas. 

The men and women of the Lastra went many of them down 
into the city to hear this wonderful music which Pippa’s son 
had made, — poor Pippa, who had always plaited ill. And 
many more, who could not go, heard of it on the market-days, 
and brought back all the strange marvels of it that were told 
and said, how at midnight on Christmas Eve, when the people 
sang all together in the cathedral, praising God for the past 
year, for the good and ill together, some solitary voice had 
lifted itself and sung the death-song of the Christians, inso- 
much that the whole multitude was carried away as with one 
impulse, and chanted it together as by one voice, standing and 
beating their breasts with streaming eyes under the great dome, 
when the music had got upon them, so that no force could 
restrain them, but, singing still, they had poured out under the 
midnight stars into the fresh air, and gone their various ways 
in the teeth of the northern wind, singing the hymn still in all 


420 


SIQNA. 


the streets, and filling Florence with it, as it had been filled in 
the olden time with the litanies of Savonarola. 

All that Bruno heard, when he drove his mule through the 
little towns, or went down into the city to buy or sell ; all that, 
and much more of the same spirit, in the winter-time, when 
he worked by lantern-light early and late, and the snow lay on 
the mountains between him and the sea. 

Luigi Bini went and heard, and said his Nunc Dimittis in 
the great peace of his heart. He had loved Music, and had 
served her as the very humblest and lowest of her drudges ; 
and it had been given to him to feed on his crumbs of knowl- 
edge, and refresh with his cup of the water of faith, this young 
High-Priest of hers, this heaven-born Apollino. 

Sitting in an obscure corner of the vast area of the Pagli- 
ano, the old man heard the thunders of applause, and saw the 
house filled from floor to roof, and listened to the grave-song 
of Actea, and thanked fate which had let him live so long : few 
men can do as much. 

“ Will you not go and hear it?” he said to Bruno. 

Bruno answered, — 

“ No.” 

“ No ! Not when the city rings with it?” 

“ Why should I ? I have heard it, — long ago, — when he 
was a little child, sitting in the thrashed straw, playing on the 
old cracked lute I gave him. I had it all, — so long ago.” 

“ A child’s twitterings on a lute ! You talk idly : you know 
nothing of this.” 

“ I know enough,” said Bruno. For in his heart he still 
hated it, the art which had taken away Pippa’s son. It was 
always his antagonist, always his conqueror. 

But for that, Signa would have been so happy in the little 
house that would have been built by the brook where the 
rushes blew. So happy, — and safe always. 

He and Palma worked in the short winter days, and got up 
in the dark and beat the black earth for their daily bread ; and 
neither of them ever forgave this mystical passion which had 
usurped the life of Signa and taken him from them to give 
him to the world. 

Bruno worked early and late, because it had been his habit 
from his birth upward, and had so grown into him as to be a 
very part of himself. But he had lost zest in it. He had no 


SIQNA. 


421 


longer any aim. The man, by temper open-handed, did not 
care to save for saving’s sake and the mere pleasure of seeing 
the money accumulate, as most men did ; and Signa did not 
want his help. Signa earned his own money. 

Life, without a central purpose around which it can revolve, 
is like a star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great 
affection or a great aim gone, the practical life may go on 
loosely, indifferently, mechanically, but it takes no grip on 
outer things, it has no vital interest, it gravitates to nothing. 

Bruno was too hardy and too used to the ways of labor to 
leave any labor undone or ill done ; but the days were all stu- 
pid alike to him ; he would have been content to have had no 
more of them. His crops, his cattle, his fruits, his oil, ceased 
to fill him with pride or to rack him with anxiety ; a bad year 
or a good year was the same to him ; he had no end to save 
for ; there was Lippo in the three fields by the brook ; and 
Signa wanted no help. The old gloom fell upon him ; the 
old dark thoughts took possession of him. 

The people on the hill saw that he worked harder than 
ever he had done before, now that he was once more alone. 
But they did not know that the joy had gone out of the work 
for him. 

Before, Bruno had had that pride and pleasure in his daily 
labors without which labor is but as the task of the treadmill. 
In his comely stacks, in his even furrows, in his plenteous 
crops, in his cleanly vines, in his well-nourished beasts, he had 
taken delight. His fields had been to him as a fair picture ; 
his harvests as a stout victory ; he would have plowed against 
any man to and fro the steepest slope with the same triumph 
in his skill as that which fills the breast of the artist in con- 
templating his finished masterpiece. 

But now all that was changed with him. His work had lost 
that gladness in it which alone sweetens life’s perpetual strug- 
gle. A sense of captivity had come over him. That large 
liberty which the breath of the mountains gives had gone away 
from him. * 

One market-day he had to stay later in the city over a bar- 
gain which Saverio had bidden him miss on no account; it was 
night before he could harness his little beast and think of 
moving homeward. It was Twelfth-Night, and all the place 
was in a pleasant tumult. Carnival had come in that day, and 

36 


422 


SIGNA. 


everywhere there were laughter and lights and sport and jest, 
and at the corners of the streets maskers were dancing. 

Time had been when he had had full zest in that merry 
fooling ; when he had come down in the dark evenings from 
his homestead, walking all the way, and spent the midnight in 
the masked riot, leaping round the bonfires and flying in the 
circles of the mad dancers, and then had gone up again before 
dawn broke to his oxen and his wheat-fields and his olive- 
pressing. 

But those days were done for him : he passed through the 
mummers dark and silent, with never a look at them, with his 
cloak wrapped across his mouth. His errand took him past 
the great theatre ; the lighted lamps gleamed on the printed 
word of Actea ; a multitude was thronging in, while the city 
clocks chimed eight. 

Bruno halted a moment. He had said he would never hear 
it. A sort of Hatred thrilled in him at sight of the gathering 
people : it was to fill their ears and to have his name in their 
mouths that Signa had forsworn the old safe ways of his 
mother’s people. 

So Bruno thought, at least, who did not know that genius 
is, at its best, but a slave, driven on by the whip of an impe- 
rious and incomprehensible obligation. 

He had said he never would hear it. But at sight of that 
dense’ crowd pressing inwards, a curious impulse to go with 
them seized on him. 

Without thinking much what he did, he entered too ; drew 
from his pouch the price they asked him ; and found himself 
carried onwards by the pressure into the body of the house. 

He had been there once or twice in his life, — no more. It 
is the theatre of the people indeed, but peasants go to humbler 
ones, and Bruno, except on Carnival nights, had uever, even 
in his maddest years of youth, spent much time in the city. 
The Lastra had been his world. 

He stood and leaned against a pillar, as he might have done 
in a church, and the sweet, solemn harmonies of the overture 
thrilled through the immense space round him. 

Look where he would, there was a sea of human faces ; the 
theatre was crowded, and there was not empty room left for a 
little child. A curious emotion filled him with pain and pride 
together. All this throng of living people was summoned by 


SIONA. 


423 


the magic of the boy whom he had lifted from the breast of his 
dead mother like a lamb from a drowned ewe. He had never 
realized before what thing it was, this power of the artist on 
the multitude; this power which is most the result of genius in 
proportion as it is least its object. As he watched the silent, 
breathless multitude, such a power seemed to him like a sorcery. 

He recognized the beauty of the music, but it was not that 
which moved him. It was to see all that rapt intent throng 
of men and women ruled by the spell cast on them by the boy 
who, to him, was still only as a child, — the boy who only a 
day before, as it seemed to him, had been a little thing carrying 
a load of vine-leaves for the cattle, and happy if a crust of 
bread were given him to eat on the hill-side at noonday. 

He stood and watched and listened : the rapturous applause, 
the tearful silence, the ecstasies of admiration, made his brain 
dizzy, and his heart throbbed. This was fame, — to hold a 
mass of idle, curious, indifferent people in these trances of de- 
light, in these rhapsodies of emotion : he understood it at last. 
Each wave of these great sounds seemed to lift the boy he 
loved farther and farther from him. The shouts of the mul- 
titude were like the noise of a sea-tempest in his ears, bearing 
away from him and drowning the one innocent affection of his 
life. He realized his own impotence to follow or reach or do 
anything more to aid the life which had been swept out of his 
orbit. All in a moment Signa grew an inaccessible, unfamiliar 
far-distant thing to him, — like any one of those stars which 
he looked up to at night, and which the priests said were 
worlds lying in the hollow of the hand of Deity. 

“ It is to be like a god,” he said to himself, as the music 
pealed through the space around him and held the people quiet 
in the breathlessness of their delight. He did not wonder any 
more that Signa had refused to be content with beating the 
earth for his daily bread. 

He heard two men close by him say, — 

“ It is strange the boy himself should be away, — the first 
time any of his music is given here, — his own city, too, as one 
may call it.” 

“ Ay : he is in Rome. They play the Lamia there in Car- 
nival.” 

“ And there is a woman, so they say.” 

“ There always is a woman.” 


424 


SIGNA. 


The two men passed onward, laughing. 

Bruno touched them. 

“ Sirs, — forgive me, — is that true?” 

“ Is what true?” 

They looked at him in surprise ; a contadino with his dark 
cloak about him, and his careless defiance of attitude, and his 
look of the mountain and the weather. 

“ That which you said, — that there is a woman ? that this 
is why he does not come?” 

“ Ah ! we know nothing,” they answered him, lightly. “So 
they say. So young as he is, and a lion everywhere, it is quite 
natural. But what can it be to you?” 

“ I am from his country,” said Bruno, simply. He thought, 
perhaps, it would not do the lad good to say much more. “ I 
come from the Lastra, if you could tell me anything of him?” 

“Indeed we know nothing,” said the men. “We never saw 
the youth ; but every one is talking of him ; so they will gos- 
sip, — it may not be true. That is all : somebody said a woman 
kept him down in Borne, — some light woman out of France. 
But they would be sure to say so, true or untrue. Fame is a 
sugared paper ; but it brings all wasps down on it. Nay, in- 
deed, we know no more.” 

And with many asseverations and many excuses, as though 
he were a prince and not a peasant, courtesy being the common 
way of the country, the men went out through the crowd into 
the night-air, and Bruno followed with the passing throng. 

“ Some light woman out of France.” 

The words rung in his ear like a hornet’s booming. 

He harnessed his mule, and went back through the gay 
merry glittering streets, and over the river across dark Oltrarno 
and so out into the solitary country. 

He met scarcely any one upon the way. 

The high-road was quiet as a bridle-path across the fields, 
and the Lastra was hushed, with fastened casements, and asleep. 

The mule flew speedily over the level ground, and strained 
slowly up the steep hill-road ; the river shone ; the leafless 
plain was dark; the night was very cold; the skies were 
clouded ; a dark winter storm hung over where the sea lay, 
and hid the Lyre, and the Cross of Cygnus, and the five star! 
dedicated to the plumed steed which bears poets to their dream, 
and lifts them to the highest height, — to let them fall. 


SIGNA. 


425 


“ A light woman out of France.” 

The words went with him as a curse rings on the ear long 
after it is spoken. 

What would she do with him ? with that tender reed of 
his soul, which the gods had singled out from all its fellows, 
and taken away from the mountain-brook of its birth to make 
into a flute for their pleasure ? 

Bruno drove on through the gloom up into the loneliness 
of his own hills. 

He felt like one chained. 

The life which had seemed to him the best of all lives grew 
into a prison-cell. He was wedded to the soil ; fastened down 
to one daily track ; held fast as by a cord about his feet. 

It had always seemed to him so well that a man should 
never stir from one nook, — should get his bread where his 
fathers got theirs, — should find his joys and his pains in one 
spot, — should live and die on the soil that saw his birth. Men 
who sought fortune far afield had seemed to him no better 
than the gypsies. Men who bore their restless discontent for- 
ever to fresh pastures had seemed to him base sons of a fair 
country. A narrow field was a world too wide for a man to 
do the duties of it, so his people had always said, dwelling 
here, and letting the centuries go by without bringing to them 
any change. Generation after generation, they had filled the 
graves that the sheep cropped around the old brown church. 
He had always said, “ Mine will be there too,” and been con- 
tent. 

Now — all in a moment — the hill-side that he loved narrowed 
to a prison-house. Other men were free to come and go, to 
follow the evil that they dreaded, and seek it out and combat 
it ; but the peasant cannot stir. 

The earth has fed him ; the earth claims him. He is her 
son, but he is her bondman too ; as Ishmael was Abraham’s. 

All peril and all shame might encompass the young wander- 
ing life of Signa, and the man who had set himself to give his 
own life for it could not move to see the truth or wrestle against 
fate. 

“ A light woman out of France.” 

The words ran with him through the dark like furies chasing 
him. 

It might not be true : it might be true. 

36 * 


m 


SIGN A. 


It might be Tue : what likelier ? 

Signa, inspired of heaven, and among sharp human eyes a 
fool, — as genius always is, — a giant in his art, an infant in his 
ignorance, — what plaything costlier or more alluring to a 
woman ? 

He had the power of the Apollo Cynthaeriredes indeed over 
men ; but in all other things, save his music, he was but a 
child, — a child still half asleep, who looked at life with smiling 
eyes and stretched his hands to it as to a sunbeam. What 
likelier than that a woman held him ? and a woman worthless 
it was sure to be. The heart of silver falls ever into the hands 
of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine. 

Fate will have it so. Fate is so old, and weary of her 
task ; she must have some diversion. It is Fate who blinded 
Love — for sport — and on the shoulders of Possession hung 
the wallet full of stones and sand — Satiety. 

Bruno reasoned nothing so. 

Only he knew the boy ; and he knew Love ; and he said to 
himself, — 

“ Fate will come that way.” 

He had no hope ; he felt that what the men had said was 
true. There was a woman yonder there in Home. 

Of course it might be so, and no harm come. Hurricanes 
pass ; some trees stand and are the stronger for the storm ; 
some break and fall forever. 

Or there might be no hurricane ; only a sweet mild south 
wind that blew a little hotly for a space and whirled him on it 
like a straw : — no more. 

But not to be there ! — not to know ! Groing through the 
winter night to his lonely house, Bruno felt as though the 
soil that he had loved as loyal sons their mothers, was a jail. 

His feet were fettered to it. 

An alien force held the life that he had sworn to save, and 
might destroy it and he never nearer, but working like his 
beasts among the sprouting corn, from dawn to night, no freer 
than the beasts were. 

Beaching the summit of the hill, he looked back southward 
to the low mountains that lie between the plain and Home. 

The black clouds that folded the Winged Horse in their 
mists had not stretched thicker ; over those mountains there 
was darkness, but the stars were seen. Far away, above where 


SJGNA. 


427 


they told him was the place of Rome, the star Argol was 
shining clearer than all the rest. 

Astrology and astronomy alike were naught to him ; he 
could find his way by Polaris if wandering at night, — that was 
all : for the rest they were to him only veiled, nameless won- 
ders that he never thought of : only this star he knew, Argol, 
dreaded of Arab and Chaldean. 

For on the night when Dina had died above there where the 
pines were, that star had shone alone, as it did now, when all 
the sky was dark. 

And an old man, now dead, a shepherd, who had been a 
soldier of Napoleon in his youth, and had brought strange 
perilous faiths and fancies with him from the land of Egypt, 
had said to him that night when Dina had died, — 

“ That is the Demon Star. We knew it in the desert. It 
means death, — or worse.” 

Rruno had known it always ever after ; he knew it now. 
Argol was shining above Rome. 

Men who dwell in solitude are superstitious. There is no 
“ chance” for them. 

The common things of earth and air to them grow portents ; 
and it is easier for them to believe that the universe revolves 
to serve the earth, than to believe that men are to the universe 
as the gnats in the sunbeam to the sun ; they can sooner credit 
that the constellations are charged with their destiny, than 
that they can suffer and die without arousing a sigh for them 
anywhere in all creation. It is not vanity, as the mocker too 
hastily thinks. It is the helpless pathetic cry of the mortal 
to the immortal nature from which he springs : 

“ Leave me not alone : confound me not with the matter 
that perishes : I am full of pain ; have pity !” 

To be the mere sport of hazard, as a dead moth is on the 
wind, — the -heart of man refuses to believe it can be so with 
him. To be created only to be abandoned, — he will not think 
that the forces of existence are so cruel and so unrelenting 
and so fruitless. In the world he may learn to say that he 
thinks so and is resigned to it ; but in loneliness the enumbra ^ 
of his own existence lies on all creation, and the winds and 
the stars and the daylight and night and the vast unknown 
mute forces of life all seem to him that they must of neces- 
sity be either his ministers or his destroyers. 


428 


SIGNA. 


Bruno went on with a shudder in his veins, — beholding 
Argol. 

He had released his weary mule from his burden, and walked 
up the steep path between his winter fields, holding the droop- 
ing mouth of the beast. It was very cold in the hours before 
morning on the heights where he dwelt. There was ice on 
the roots of the pines where the rain-waters had settled, and 
the north winds chased the great clouds around the head of 
the hill. His home was dark and silent. 

When he had put the mule in the stall and thrown down 
hay for it, he entered his house, with the cheerlessness of the 
place closing in upon him like a numbing frost. He paused 
on his threshold and looked back at the southward skies. 

Argol was shining over Home. 

He set his lantern down before his crucifix that hung against 
the wall. 

“ Are you not stronger than that star?” he muttered to it. 
“ I have tried hard to serve you : are you not stronger ? — can 
you not save him ? — let the star take my soul if it must have 
one. My soul ! — not his. Do you not hear ? Do we all cry, 
and you are deaf? Let the star do its worst on me : that does 
not matter. Do you hear?” 

The crucifix hung motionless upon the wall. He had ex- 
pected some sign, he knew not what. 

Men had often been answered by such signs ; so the priest 
told him,: — out of the lives of saints in the legend of gold. 

But for him all was dark, all was silent. No voice answered 
him in his perplexity. Nothing cared. 

Only through his open door he saw the blackness of the 
night and Argol shining. 


CHAPTEE XLVL 

“ Dear Nita,” said Lippo, one night, toasting himself over 
a little pot of charcoal, “ do you know I met my old friend 
Fede in the city this morning? He has come from Eome.” 

Nita grunted an indifferent assent; she was sorting and 
numbering a pile of sheets and other house-linen ; her eldest 


GNA. 


429 


daughter Kita was about to marry a corn-chandler of Pistoia, 
— a very good marriage, for the youth was rich and had a farm 
to boot, and Rita was of that turbulent temper, and had that 
strong love of theatres, jewelry, and gadding about which 
makes a burden of responsibility that a mother prefers to 
shelve from her own shoulders to a son-in-law’s as soon as mav 
be. 

“ Fede is doing well in Rome,” said Lippo, loquacious and 
confidential as it was his wont to be, especially when he had 
anything in his mind that he intended to keep secret. “ Only 
think ! twenty years ago Fede was a poor lean lad here, glad 
to get a copper by the holding of a horse or running with a 
message ; and now he is as plump and well-to-do a soul as one 
could want to see, with a shop of his own, and good money in 
the banks, and a vineyard by Frascati, — all by knowing how 
to get old women to give their dingy lace up for a song, and 
coaxing plowmen to barter old coins they turn up from the 
mud for brand-new francs, and having the knack to make 
cracked pots and pans and pipkins into something wonderful 
and ancient ! What a thing it is to be clever ! But Provi- 
dence helps always those who help themselves.” 

“What have we to do with Fede?” said Niti, who knew 
that when her lord praised Providence for helping others he 
generally had put his own spoon into their soup-plate. 

“ Oh, nothing, — nothing !” said Lippo, caressing his charcoal- 
pan. “ Only, if ever we see any little old thing, — no value, 
you know, — a saucer, or a pitcher, or a cup, or a plate that the 
old folks use about here, — there are scores, you know, — why, 
we can give them nice new platters or jugs fresh made from 
Boccia, and take the old ones and send to Fede: do you see? 
We shall do a good turn so to all our friends, — to those poor 
souls who will have new whole things to use instead of old 
ones, and to Fede, who deals in such droll antique things to 
the rich foreigners.” 

Nita’s eyes sparkled. 

“ He will give us well for them ?” she said, suspiciously, 
never having learned in all her years of marriage the fine arts 
and the delicacy of her lord. 

Lippo waved his hand. 

“ Oh, my dear ! — between friends ! Fede is the soul of 
honor. It will be a pleasure to look out for him ; and, besides. 


430 


SIGN A. 


such a benefit to one’s poor neighbors, who will have whole, 
smooth, pretty china, instead of the cracked clumsy pots that 
the silly English-speaking nations like to worship. I did say 
to Fede, — for one must always think of what is just in con- 
science before all else, — Is it right to sell pipkins and pang for 
idols to the English ? And Fede said that for his part, too, 
he had had that scruple, but that the English are pagans, all 
of them, always, and, if they cannot get a pipkin to put on an 
altar under glass, fall on their knees before a big red book, 
like a mass-book, that they call a Pi-rage. No one knows 
what is in it, only by what they find, there, or do not find, 
they smile or frown ; some book of a black art, no doubt. So 
that the pipkin is the more innocent thing, because, when they 
get a pipkin, then they smile all round. So Fede says ” 

“ But he will pay us well for anything we find ?” said Nita, 
always impatient of her husband’s moral digressions. “ Many 
gld wives I know of have platters and jugs hundreds of years 
old and more, — if that is what they want, — such rubbish !” 

Lippo waved his hands with a soft gesture to the empty air. 

“ Dearest, we are alone. It does not matter. I know your 
noble nature. But if any one were here — a stranger, or the 
children — they might think, hearing you, that our souls were 
basely set on gaining for ourselves. Praise be to the saints, 
we are above all need of that now.” 

“ With Toto spending all he does !” grumbled his wife, who, 
for her part, thought it very silly to waste such pretty periods 
when nobody was listening ; why wash your face unless you 
walk abroad? 

“ The pleasure,” continued Lippo, as though she had not 
interrupted him, — “ the pleasure will be in doing two good 
turns : for one, to Fede, whom we have known all our lives, — 
good, thrifty, honest soul, — and to our neighbors ; just those 
dear old wives you spoke of, who will be made happy by nice 
new china in the stead of ugly cracked old pots, heavy as iron. 
And then there may be now and then a little matter of lace, 
too, — or a crucifix, — or a bit of old embroidery, — anything 
that is very ugly and dropping quite to pieces pleases the 
foreigners. There is so much hereabouts, in the old farms 
and the dames’ kitchen-nooks. But of that we will talk 
more. It is a new idea. Fede just spoke of it this morning. 
He said to me, ‘ There is much money to be made this way ; 


STGNA. 


431 


not but what I know you do not care for that, — only to serve 
me and your towns-folks.’ And so he took me in my weakest 
point !” 

Nita grinned, marking her sheets. 

She was a rough downright vigorous woman, with some ■ 
sense of humor, and the delicate reasonings of her husband, 
when they did not rouse her wrath, tickled her into laughter. 

She did not understand that he deceived himself with them 
almost as much as he did others, blowing round himself always 
this incense of fair motives till he believed the scented smoke 
was his own breath. 

“ It is quite a new idea,” pursued Lippo, “ and may turn 
out some benefit to ourselves and others. The other lads are 
all well placed, but Toto is a torment, — nay, dear boy, I know 
you love him best of all, and so do I, perhaps, after my Rita, 
but his bold bright youth boils over at times. Oh, it is only 
the seething of the new-pressed grapes ; the wine will be the 
richer and the better by-and-by, — oh, yes. Still, love, there 
is no being blind to it. Toto is a cause for trouble. Now, I 
see an opening for Toto down in Rome, with Fede. The dear 
boy does not love labor. It will just suit him well ; saunter- 
ing about to find the pots and pans and lace and carvings, and 
idling in the shop to show them afterwards to the great 
strangers and fine ladies. And Fede will look after him and 
have a care of him, — a fatherly care ; and Toto, in time, may 
come to have a vineyard of his own out by Frascati. And 
he will please the ladies, — he is a pretty lad. Yes, Fede spoke 
much of it to me to-day. He wants just such a boy, and 
hinted at a partnership in trade hereafter. Of course the 
future always rests with God. We see imperfectly.” 

“It seems a nice easy trade,” said Nita, tempted; “and 
lying must be handy in it: that would suit him. No one lies 
so nattily as Toto.” 

“ Oh, my love,” sighed Lippo, “ make no jests of the dear 
lad’s infirmity : his sportiveness leads him into danger, and he 
is too quick of wit ; it is a peril for young tongues, — sore 
peril. But you mistake, indeed. This trade, as you call it, 
is a most honest one. It buys from some people what they 
do not want, to sell to some others what they long for ; it 
helps the poor, and shows the rich innocent ways of easing 
their overflow of gold. Oh, a most honest trade ; a trade in- 


432 


SIGNA. 


deed that one may even call benevolent. You cannot think 
that I would place your precious boy in any employ where 
the soul’s safety would be imperiled for him. But to see well 
into this thing and judge of it, and study Fede’s books, which 
he offers in the most candid way to show to me, it will be 
needful that I should run down with him to Rome.” 

“ What !” screamed his wife, and let her sheets falf tum- 
bling to the ground. 

In all their many years of wedded life Lippo had never 
stirred from her roof for any journey ; she had been a jealous 
woman, and he had given her cause for jealousy, though never 
means of proof that she had cause. Besides, no one ever 
stirred from the Lastra from their life’s beginning to its end, 
unless for some day out at Impruneta ass-fair, or the feast of 
St. Francis in Fiesole, or the grain- and cattle-markets over the 
plain at Prato or such another town. Folks of the Lastra 
never travel. It is not a Tuscan way. 

“ Fede goes down to-morrow, and I think it will be well 
that I should go with him,” said Lippo, who was quite re- 
solved to go, but never made a scene for anything, holding 
that rage and haste knotted your flax and never carded it. 
“ It is a great opening for Toto, your father will see that, — 
and, I think, the very thing that will be suited to the lad ; 
for even you, my love, cannot deny that he is idler than one 
well could wish. It will cost very little, — only the journey. 
I shall lodge and eat with Fede ; that is understood. And 
then there is your aunt, my dear, the good old Fanfanni ; I 
might look in on her at Assisi, passing; you have had ill 
news for her health, and she has no chick nor child, and what 
she has will be going to the Church, unless, indeed ” 

“ Then it is I should go, not you,” said Nita, hotly. “ The 
Church ! If she has any bowels for her own kin, — never ! 
My father’s only sister, and we with six sons and daughters ! 
To the Church ! — oh, infamous ! I will go with you, Lippo.” 

“ Oh, my dearest, if you only could ! But only ten days 
to Rita’s marriage, and the young man coming here daily, and 
all the bridal clothes unmade, — you never can be spared ; it 
would not be decorous, my dear. And I shall be back in such 
a little time, — three nights at most ; and as for your aunt’s 
money and the Church, my love, we must use no influence to 
hinder any sickening soul from making peace with heaven. 


SIGNA. 


433 


For me, I shall not say a word. If she wish to leave it to the 
Church, she shall, for me. But, old and ailing and alone, it 
is only fit that one should show her that, though she quarreled 
with your father in her haste, we have no malice, and no cold- 
ness ; that is only right ; and perhaps if you put up some 
little thing, — some raspberry syrup or some preserved peaches, 
— just some little thing that I could take with me, it might 
be well, — to show we bear no malice. Dear, pack me a shirt 
or two, and a suit of clothes in case of getting wet : I need no 
more. And now I will go down and tell your father : he is 
so shrewd and full of sense. I never do anything without his 
counsel.” 

Lippo went down-stairs, knowing that old Baldo would 
count out a score of dirty yellow notes to be rid of the lad 
Toto, or have the mere hope of being rid of him ; and his 
wife grumbling and screaming and crying she was the worst- 
used woman in the land, yet did his will and packed him up 
his things. 

Nita believed she ruled her husband with a rod of iron ; but, 
unknown to herself, she was bent by him into as many shapes 
and to as many uses as he liked. 

A firm will, sheathed in soft phrases, is a power never re- 
sisted in a little household or in the world of men. 

“ After all, Toto will be miles away in Borne,” she mused, 
thinking uneasily of many freaks and foibles which made the 
Lastra hot as an oven for her Benjamin, and many a bundle 
of good money wheedled out of her by false stories to be 
thrown away into the bottomless abysses of the tombola or 
the State lottery. 

So she packed her husband’s shirts, grumbling but acqui- 
escent, and added little dainties for the old aunt at Assisi, and 
put with them a pictured card of the Agnus Dei, and then 
went out and told her neighbors that her lord was called away 
in Borne. 

To Borne ! It was as if she said to the very end of the known 
world. It gave her a kind of dignity and majesty to have a 
husband traveling so far ; it made her almost like a senator’s 
wife ; she almost began to think the Pope had sent for him. 

So Lippo got his will and departed in peace, where any other 
man, less mild and clever, would have raised a storm above his 
head and gone away under a rain of curses. 

T 37 


434 


SIGN A, 


Nita was a shrew, certainly, and Baldo a crabbed old cur- 
mudgeon, and both, when Lippo had married, had held their 
money-bags tight; but Lippo by good judgment and wise 
patience had got both Nita and Baldo under his thumb with- 
out their knowing it, and had the money-bags too ; and yet he 
never said a harsh word, — never. 

“ The fool is violent,” said Lippo. “If we can only fly 
and fume like angry dogs, why is our reason given us?” 

Man was marked out from the brutes by the distinctive 
human faculty of being able to cheat his fellows ; that was what 
he thought, only he never used any such a word as cheat. Ho 
never used any unpleasant words. If driven by the weakness 
of mortality ever into any breath of anger, he confessed it to 
his priest with instant and unfeigned repentance. He was 
ashamed of it as an error of intelligence. 

“ If we sin with our body, perhaps we cannot help it ; that 
is animal in us,” he would say : “ but to go astray with our 
mind is shameful. That is the human and divine part of us.” 

And he used his humanity and divinity with much skill for 
an unlearned man who only knew the little world of his own 
birthplace. 

And he journeyed now to Rome peaceably, keeping the real 
chief object of his journey to himself, and pausing at Assisi to 
see the old sick aunt, whom he so charmed with his syrups and 
confections and his disinterested religious fervor that she made 
up her mind that Mother Church was, after all, as well off as 
a fat sitting hen, and determined to leave her savings, which 
made a nice little nest-egg, as her life had been long and pru- 
dent and laborious, to this good man and to his children. 

“ Though Baldo is a bad one,” said she, shaking her white 
head. 

Lippo smiled and sighed. 

“ Oh, a kind soul, only too bent on things of the mere 
passing world, and thinking too much that heaven is like the 
binding to a shoe, — the last thing to be thought of, and stitched 
on in a minute when you want.” 

“ A bad one,” said the old woman, thinking all the more 
evil of him from his son-indaw’s gentle words; for Lippo, 
though he had never heard of a little crooked poet in the 
northern isles, knew to perfection the artistic way to “ hint a 
fault and hesitate dislike.” 


SIGNA. 


435 


And when he was gone, she hobbled straight to a notary’s 
office in the town, and made her testament, bequeathing a 
small sum for masses for her soul, but leaving all the rest to 
her grandnephews and grandnieces in the Lastra, under their 
father’s rule. 

“ Mother Church is plump enough without my crumb,” she 
said to herself, “and never a priest among them all has ever 
thought to bring me a sup of syrup. They can give one 
eternal life, I know ; but still, when one’s cough is trouble- 
some ” 

So Lippo, dropping his bread on many waters by the way, 
journeyed discreetly down to Rome. 


CHAPTER XLVIL 

Bruno lay down that night, but for an hour only. He 
could not sleep. 

He rose before the sun was up, in the gray wintry break of 
day, while the fog from the river rose like a white wall built 
up across the plain. 

It is the season when the peasant has the least to do. Plow- 
ing, and sowing, and oil-pressing, all are past ; there is little 
labor for man or beast; there is only garden-work for the 
vegetable-market, and the care of the sheep and cattle, where 
there are any. In large households, where many brothers and 
sisters get round the oil-lamp and munch roast chestnuts and 
thrum a guitar, or tell ghost-stories, these short empty days 
are very well : sometimes there is a stranger lost coming over 
the pine woods, sometimes there is a snow-storm and the sheep 
want seeing to ; sometimes there is the old roistering way of 
keeping Twelfth-Night, even on these lonely wind-torn heights; 
where the house is full and merry, the short winter passes not 
so very dully ; but in the solitary places, where men brood 
alone, as Bruno did, they are heavy enough ; all the rest of 
the world might be dead and buried, the stillness is so un- 
broken, the loneliness so great. 

He got up and saw after his few sheep above among the 
pines ; one or two of them were near lambing ; then he labored 


436 


SIGNA. 


on his garden mould among the potato-plants and cauliflowers, 
the raw mist in his lungs and the sea-wind blowing. It had 
become mild weather: the red rose on his house-wall was in 
bud, and the violets were beginning to push from underneath 
the moss ; but the mornings were always very cold and damp. 

An old man came across from Carniignano to beg a pumpkin 
gourd or two ; he got a scanty living by rubbing them up and 
selling to the fishermen down on the Arno. Bruno gave them. 
He had known the old creature all his life. 

“ You are dull here,” said the old man, timidly ; because 
every one was more or less afraid of Bruno. 

Bruno shrugged his shoulders and took up his spade again. 

“ Your boy does grand things, they say,” said the old man ; 
‘‘ but it would be cheerfuller for you if he had taken to the 
soil.” 

Bruno went on digging. 

“ It is like a man I know,” said the pumpkin-seller, think- 
ing the sound of his own voice must be a charity. “ A man 
that helped to cast church-bells. He cast bells all his life ; he 
never did anything else at all. ‘ It is brave work,’ said he to 
me once, ‘ sweating in the furnace there, and making the metal 
into tuneful things to chime the praise of all the saints and 
angels ; but when you sweat and sweat and sweat, and every 
bell you make just goes away and is swung up where you 
never see or hear it ever again, — that seems sad ; my bells are 
all ringing in the clouds, saving the people’s souls, greeting 
Our Lady ; but they are all gone ever so far away from me. 
I only hear them ringing in my dreams.’ Now, I think, the 
boy is like the bells — to you.” 

Bruno dug in the earth. 

“ The man was a fool,” said he. “ Who cared for his sweat 
or sorrow ? It was his work to melt the metal. That was 
all.” 

“ Ay,” said the pumpkin-seller, and shouldered the big yel- 
low wrinkled things that he had begged ; “ but never to hear 
the bells, — that is sad work.” 

Bruno smiled grimly. 

“ Sad ! He could hear some of them as other people did, 
no doubt, ringing far away against the skies while he was in 
the mud. That was all he wanted ; if he were wise, he did 
not even want so much as that. Good-day.” 


SIQNA. 


437 


It was against his wont to speak so many words on any other 
thing than the cattle- or the olive-harvest or the prices of 
seeds and grain in the market in the town. He set his heel 
upon his spade and pitched the earth-begrimed potatoes in the 
skip he filled. 

The old man nodded and went, — to wend his way to Car- 
mignano. 

Suddenly he turned back ; he was a tender-hearted fanciful 
soul, and had had a long lonely life himself. 

“ I tell you what,” he said, a little timidly ; “ perhaps the 
bells praising God always, ringing the sun in and out, and 
honoring Our Lady, — perhaps they went for something in the 
lives of the men that made them ? I think they must. It 
would be hard if the bells got everything, the makers nothing.” 

Over Bruno’s face a slight change went. His imperious 
eyes softened. He knew the old man spoke in kindness. 

“ Take these home with you. Nay, no thanks,” he said, 
and lifted on the other’s back the dreelful of potatoes dug for 
the market. 

The old man blessed him, overjoyed; he was sickly and 
very poor, and hobbled on his way along the side of the 
mountains. 

Bruno went to other work. 

If the bells ring true and clear, and always to the honor of 
the saints, a man may be content to have sweated for it in the 
furnace and to be forgotten ; but if it be cracked in a fire and 
the pure ore of it melt away shapeless ! The thought went 
confusedly through his brain as he cleaned out the stalls of 
his cattle. 

Down in the plain all the bells were ringing, the sweet peal 
of San Giusto replying to the long full chime of Peretftlata 
from across the water, and all the other villages calling to one 
another over the wintry fields ; some with one little humble 
voice, some with many melodious notes, while down in the 
hollow, where the city lay, the deep cathedral bells were boom- 
ing, and all the countless churches answering ; but Bruno on 
his hill heard none of these. 

He only heard the winds moaning among the unbending 
pines. 

He only heard the toads cry to one another, feeling rain 
coming, “ Crake ! crake 1 crake ! We love a wet world as men 
87 * 


438 


SIGNA. 


an evil way. The skies are going to weep ; let us be merry. 
Crock ! crock ! crock !” 

And they waddled out, — slow, quaint, black things, with 
arms akimbo, and stared at him with their shrewd hard eyes. 
They would lie snug a thousand years within a stone and be 
quite happy. 

Why were not men like that ? 

Toads are kindly in their way, and will get friendly. Only 
men seem to them such fools. 

The toad is a fakir, and thinks the beatitude of life lies in 
contemplation. Men fret and fuss and fume, and are forever 
in haste ; the toad eyes them with contempt. 

The toads looked at Bruno now, and he at them. 

A soft thick rain had begun to fall. It scudded over the 
plain and crossed the river, and came up the hill-side, dim and 
yet dense, stealing noiselessly, and spreading vastly, as if it 
were the ghostly hosts of a dead afmj. 

Sometimes, on the hill-tops, clouds would break that never 
touched the plain ; sometimes in the plain it was pouring, 
while the hills were all in sunshine. Now mountain and val- 
ley had the rain alike. 

Bruno worked on in it, not heeding, till the water ran off his 
hair, and his shirt was soaking. He did not think about it. 
He was thinking of what the men had said : “ A light woman 
out of France.” 

All the evil in the world might be happening that very 
hour, and he would know nothing. 

There was no way to move, no way to hear. He was like 
a chained dog. 

“ I am like the toads,” he thought : “ the whole city might 
burn to the ground, and they would croak in their pool, and 
know nothing.” 

But he was not like the toads, for he dreaded this fire 
which he could not see. 

It rained thus several days. 

Bruno saw no one. He had his hands full with the birth 
of weakly lambs, in the wet agueish weather, that made the 
mossy ground under the pines a swamp. He worked early 
and late, seeing no creature, except the dumb lad he had as 
shepherd, and the dogs. It was dark before four in the after- 
noons. He took his big lantern into the shed, and hewed 


SIGNA. 


439 


wood, or ground maize, all the evening, with the heads of the 
oxen near him, over their half-door. He felt as if he could 
not face the cold lonely kitchen and living-room, with their 
empty hearths. One or two nights he watched all night by a 
sheep in her trouble, with the great pines over his head, and 
the broken rocks strewn around. 

Do whatever he might, he looked across to where Rome 
was, and thought of the light woman out of France. 

The drenching rains hid Argol, with all the other stars. But 
he had seen it that once. It was enough. It haunted him. 

Silently and uselessly he raged against his own impotence. 
Why had he not been any creature free to roam ? — a gypsy, a 
tramp, a vagabond, — anything, so that he could now have set 
his face to the south, and bent his steps over the hills ? 

The habits of his life were on him like so many chains. 
The soil held him as the flat stone holds the sucker of leather. 
Change never occurred to him as possible. The peasant thinks 
no more of quitting his land than the sentinel his post. Come 
what may, there he stays. 

Several of these days and nights went by ; it rained always. 
There was no communication from village to village. A gray 
cloud overspread the whole great landscape. 

Bruno worked as if it were bright harvest-weather; and 
it went ill with some of his ewes, and tried him ; but going 
and coming, rising and lying down, sitting in his sheep-hut on 
the mountain-side, and working the millstones by torchlight in 
the shed, one thought alone went with him, and racked him 
sore : was it true what they said of the boy in Rome? 

At last the rain cleared ; the roads grew more passable ; the 
last lamb was born that would be born for some weeks ; he put 
the mule in the shafts, and drove down into market withTiia 
sacks of potatoes. When he had done his business, a thought 
struck him. He went to the place where he had seen the 
dancing girl of Istriel. 

The painting was gone. He asked them if they had any 
pictures of it, — the things that the sun took ? They had, and 
sold him one. It seemed to him very dear. It cost more than 
a flask of wine. 

But he took it with him. 

“ What is that man, — Istriel?’’ asked Bruno of the seller 
of the copies, who was an old Florentine, and knew something 


440 


SIGNA. 


of painters and their ways, and had been about the Villa 
Medicis in earlier years in Rome. 

The man shrugged his shoulders. 

“ He is Istriel. That is enough to say. It is as when one 
says any other great name. It speaks for itself.” 

“ Great ! From painting wantons 1” 

Tiziano painted them.” 

‘ He is not of our country ?” 

“ No. Of France. But he often works in Rome. He has 
a palace there.” 

“ I thought painters were poor. How should he live in a 
palace ?” 

“ They are poor for the most part, and I think it is best for 
their pictures when they keep so. But he is not. He paints 
naked women so beautifully that all the world runs to see. 
Not to be bigger than your time is, — that is a wonderful secret 
to make you rich.” 

“ I do not understand,” said Bruno. 

The man, who had seen hundreds of students come and go 
out of the class-rooms and the painting-rooms, laughed. 

“ Oh, I understand, because I see so much of them. They 
are all alike. They come with great bright eyes, and lean 
cheeks, and empty purses. They study our giants, they do 
beautiful things. No one wants them. They starve a few 
years, then they see what the world likes. They change, and 
paint wantons in silk clothes, or without, as large as life ; or 
else, little rapiered manikins, frilled and furbelowed, no 
bigger than a shoe-buckle. Then they make money. This 
Istriel has made more money than them all, because he draws 
with the force of our Michel Angelo and colors with the 
softness of their Greuze. He is a wise man, too. He knows 
his age, I remember him well a student down in Rome. A 
handsome, gay, charming lad, with great genius. He might 
have done better things than his naked women. But I do not 
know : very likely he is right. They call him the new Tiziano, 
and he is at the head of his school, and can get its weight in 
gold for any picture. No man needs more.” 

“ I do not understand,” said Bruno, whom all these words 
only confused. 

The old man chuckled, and nodded, and turned to other 
people to sell other photographs of the Sister of the Seven 


SIGNA. 


441 


Dancers. For many a long year he had swept out the floors, 
and set the easels, and trimmed the palettes in the Villa Me- 
dicis, and had seen the young artists grow old, and knew how 
they grew to the greed of the world, as vines to the twists of 
the maple. 

Bruno was perplexed. Painters had ever been to him mys- 
terious religious men, who lived to the glory of God, and 
made church-walls and monastic altars eloquent with sacred 
meaning to the common people. That was what he thought, — 
he, who, from the time when he had run with his father’s mule 
to market, had trodden the streets of Del Sarto, and Giotto, and 
the Memmi brethren, and said his Ave in haste in the cool 
summer dawns, in Or San Michele before the white tabernacle 
of Orcagna. 

Istriel was nothing to him. Yet his soul rose in a sullen 
scorn against the man who had so fair a gift from heaven, and 
only used it to show a dancer bounding away over “ the prim- 
rose path of hell,” and taking the foolish souls of the young 
and the guileless with her. 

Bruno would uncover his head before a Madonna or a Mag- 
dalen, and feel, without knowing why, that those who could 
make such things live on the pale plaster or the brown cypress 
wood were men worthy of honor. But against the painter of 
Innocence, all the manliness and all the strength of his char- 
acter arrayed themselves in flerce contempt. 

Going out of the street, he met Salverio. The old man 
stopped him. 

“ So they expect your boy in the town to-night, for a great 
gala ! What I Did you not know ? Perhaps he meant to 
surprise you. He has done that before. No doubt he will 
come round by the sea-way from Home to Signa.” 

“ It is possible,” muttered Bruno. “ He may be there now, 
then!” 

“ Like enough. 1 heard them saying in the streets some- 
thing, I am not sure what, df a great festa for him to-night, 
and of the king, and of your boy being sent for. He would 
be sure to come by sea, I think. Most likely he is already 
there. You had better go home. Besides, the lambs must 
not long be left.” 

“ No,” said Bruno, almost stupidly. Was it possible Signa 
was so near as this, and all the gossip of the woman that held 


SIGNA. 


442 

him was untrue? No doubt the boy meant to surprise him.' 
Each time he had done so. Each time, when his letters had 
been few and brief, he had returned safely, glad and well and 
proud. No doubt what the men had said had been a folly, 
born of jealousy and disparagement, the twin parasites that 
feed on all success, and kill it if they can. 

Bruno’s heart grew light. 

He did not stop to doubt or question. It seemed so natural. 
Nothing was likelier than that the lad, summoned for any fresh 
or special honor, would have had no space to write of it, but 
would have come round by the sea-way to tell the tale of it, 
and give a brief glad greeting, and then pass down into the 
city. Nothing likelier. 

Bruno left Salverio, in haste, thinking of the boy reaching 
the hill thence by the early morning time, as he no doubt had 
done, and finding him absent. -All these precious hours, too ! 
It was now one o’clock. “ Tocco’ ’ was sounding from all the city 
clocks. He met another man he knew, a farmer from Montelupo. 

“ Brave doings !” said the Montelupo man. “ A gala night 
to-night for the foreign prince, and your boy summoned, so 
they say. No doubt you are come in to see it all ?” 

Bruno shook himself free quickly, and went on ; for a mo- 
ment it occurred to him that it might be best to wait and see 
Signa in the town ; but then he could not do that well. 
Nothing was done at home, and the lambs could not be left 
alone to the shepherd lad’s inexperience, — only a day old, one 
or two of them, and the ground so wet, and the ewes weakly. 
To leave his farm would have seemed to Bruno as to leave his 
sinking ship does to a sailor. Besides, he had nothing to do 
with all the grandeur ; the king did not want him. 

His heart grew light again, and he felt proud as he heard 
the people talking in the streets of how the princes had ordered 
this great night of Lamia, and how the theatre would be lit 
“ like day,” and how standing room there was not to be had, — 
no, though you could give all the jewels and gold and silver for 
it otF the Jewelers’ Bridge. He felt proud. All this stir and 
tumult and wonder and homage in the city was for Signa ; 
princes seemed almost like his servants, the king like his 
henchman ! Bruno was proud, under his stern, calm, lofty 
bearing, which would not change, and would not let him smile, 
or seem so womanish-weak as to be glad for all the gossiping. 


SIGN A. 


443 


The boy wanted no king or prince. 

He said so to them, with erect disdain. 

Yet he was proud. 

“ After all, one does hear the bells ringing,” he thought, his 
mind drifting away to the old Carmignano beggar’s words. 

He was proud, and glad. 

He stopped his mule by Strozzi Palace, and pushed his way 
into the almost empty market, to the place called the Spit or 
Fila, where all day long and every day before the roaring fires 
the public cooks roast flesh and fowl to fill the public paunch 
of Florence. 

Here there was a large crowd, pushing to buy the frothing 
savory hot meats. He thrust the others aside, and bought 
half a kid smoking, and a fine capon, and thrust them in his 
cart. Then he went to a shop near, and bought some delicate 
white bread, and some foreign chocolate, and some snowy sugar. 

“ No doubt,” he thought, “ the boy had learned to like 
daintier fare than theirs in his new life ;” theirs, which was 
black crusts and oil and garlic all the year round, with meat 
and beans, perhaps, on feast-nights, now and then, by way of 
a change. Then, as he was going to get into his seat, he saw 
among the other plants and flowers standing for sale upon the 
ledge outside the palace a damask rose-tree, — a little thing, but 
covered with buds and blossoms blushing crimson against the 
stately old iron torch-rings of the smith Caprera. Bruno 
looked at it, — he who never thought of flowers from one year’s 
end to another, and cut them down with his scythe for his 
oxen to munch as he cut grass. Then he bought it. 

The boy liked all beautiful innocent things, and had been 
always so foolish about the lowliest herb. It would make the 
dark old house upon the hill look bright to him. Ashamed 
of the weaknesses that he yielded to, Bruno sent the mule on 
at its fastest pace, the little red rose-tree nodding in the cart. 

He had spent more in a day than he was accustomed to 
spend in three months’ time. 

But then the house looked so cheerless. 

As swiftly as he could make the mule fly, he drove home 
across the plain. 

The boy was there, no doubt, and would be cold, and hun- 
gry, and alone. 

Bruno did not pause a moment on his way, though more 


444 


SIGNA. 


than one called to him as he drove, to know if it were true 
indeed that this night there was to be a gala for the Lamia and 
the princes. 

He nodded, and flew through the chill gray afternoon, 
splashing the deep mud on either side of him. 

The figure of San Giusto on his high tower, the leafless 
vines and poplars, the farriers’ and coopers’ workshops on the 
road, glim Castel Pucci, that once flung its glove at Florence, 
the green low dark hills of Castagnolo, villa and monastery, 
watch-tower and bastion, homestead and convent, all flew by 
him, fleeting and unseen ; all he thought of was that the boy 
would be waiting, and want food. 

He was reckless and furious in his driving always, but his 
mule had never been beaten and breathless as it was that day 
when he tore up the ascent to his own farm as the clocks in 
the plain tolled four. 

He was surprised to see his dog lie quiet on the steps. 

“ Is he there?*’ he cried instinctively to the creature, which 
rose and came to greet him. 

There was no sound anywhere. 

Bruno pushed his door open. 

The house was empty. 

He went out again and shouted to the air. 

The echo from the mountain above was all his answer. 
When that died away, the old silence of the hills was unbroken. 

He returned and took the food and the little rose-tree out 
of his cart. 

He had bought them with eagerness, and with that tender- 
ness which was in him, and for which dead Dina had loved 
him to her hurt. He had now no pleasure in them. A bitter 
disappointment flung its chill upon him. 

Disappointment is man’s most frequent visitor, — the un- 
invited guest most sure to come ; he ought to be well used to 
it ; yet he can never get familiar. 

Bruno ought to have learned never to hope. 

But his temper was courageous and sanguine : such mad- 
men hope on to the very end. 

He put the things down on the settle, and went to put up 
the mule. The little rose-tree had been too roughly blown in 
the windy afternoon ; its flowers were falling, and some soon 
strewed the floor. 


SJGNA. 


445 


♦ Bruno looked at it when he entered. 

It hurt him ; as the star Argol had done. 

He covered the food with a cloth, ^nd set the flower out of 
the draught. Then he went to see his sheep. 

There was no train by the sea-way from Rome until night. 
Signa would not come that way now, since he had to be in 
the town for the evening. 

“ He will come after the theatre,” Bruno said to himself, 
and tried to get the hours away by work. He did not think 
of going into the city again himself. He was too proud to 
go and see a thing he had never been summoned to ; too proud 
to stand outside the doors and stare with the crowd while 
Pippa’s son was honored within. 

Besides, he could not have left the lambs all a long winter’s 
night, and the house all unguarded, and nobody there to give 
counsel to the poor mute simpleton whom he had now to tend 
his beasts. 

“ He will come after the theatre,” he said. 

The evening seemed very long. 

The late night came. Bruno set his door open, cold though 
it was, so that he should catch the earliest sound of footsteps. 
The boy, no doubt, he thought, would drive to the foot of the 
hill, and walk the rest. 

It was a clear night after the rain of many days. 

He could see the lights of the city in the plain fourteen 
miles or so away. 

What was doing down there ? 

It seemed strange, — Signa being welcomed there, and he 
himself knowing nothing, only hearing a stray word or two by 
chance. 

Once or twice in his younger days he had seen the city in 
gala over some great artist it delighted to honor ; he could 
imagine the scene and fashion of it all well enough ; he did 
not want to be noticed in it, only he would have liked to 
have been told, and to have gone down and seen it, quietly 
wrapped in his cloak, among the throng. 

That was how he would have gone, had he been told. 

He set the supper out as well as he could, and put wine 
ready, and the rose-tree in the midst. In the lamp-light the 
little feast did not look so badly. 

He wove wicker-work round some uncovered flasks, by way 
88 


4:46 


SIGNA. 


of doing something. The bitter wind blew in ; he did not 
mind that : his ear was strained to listen. Midnight passed. 
The wind had blown his lamp out. He lighted two great lan- 
terns, and hung them up against the door-posts, it was so dark 
upon the hills. 

One hour went; another; then another. There was no 
sound. When yet another passed, and it was four of the 
o’clock, he said, — 

“ He will not come to-night. No doubt they kept him 
late, and he was too tired. He will be here by sunrise.” 

He threw himself on his bed for -a little time, and closed 
the door. But he left the lanterns hanging outside, on the 
chance. 

He slept little ; he was up while it was still dark, and the 
robins were beginning their first twittering notes. 

“ He will be here to breakfast,” he said to himself, and he 
left the table untouched, only opening the shutters so that 
when day came it should touch the rose at once and wake it 
up ; it looked so drooping, as though it felt the cold. 

Then he went and saw to his beasts and to his work. 

The sun leaped up in the cold, broad, white skies. Signa 
did not come with it. 

The light brightened. The day grew. Noon brought its 
hour of rest. 

The table still stood unused. The rose-leaves had fallen in 
a little crimson pool upon it. Bruno sat down on the bench 
by the door, not having broken his fast. 

“ They are keeping him in the town,” he thought. ‘‘ He 
will come later.” 

He sat still a few moments, but he did not eat. 

In a little while he heard a step on the dead winter leaves 
and tufts of rosemary. He sprang erect ; his eyes brightened ; 
his face changed. He went forward eagerly : 

“ Signa ! — my dear ! — at last !” 

He only saw under the leafless maples and brown vine- 
tendrils a young man that he had never seen, who stopped 
before him breathing quickly from the steepness of the ascent. 

“ I was to bring this to you,” he said, holding out a long 
gun in its case. “ And to tell you that he, the youth they 
all talk of, — Signa, — went back to Home this morning ; had 
no time to come, but sends you this, with his dear love and 


SIQNA. 


447 


greeting, and will write from Korae to-night. Ah, Lord I 
There was such fuss with him in the city. He was taken to 
the foreign princes, and then the people ! — if you had heard 
them ! — all the street rang with the cheering. This morning 
he could hardly get away for all the crowd there was. I am 
only a messenger. I should be glad of wine. Your hill is 
steep.” 

Bruno took the gun from him, and put out a flask of his 
own wine on the threshold, then shut close the door. 

He stripped the covering off the gun. 

It was such a weapon as he had coveted all his life long, 
seeing such in gunsmiths’ windows and the halls of noblemen : 
breech-loading, of foreign make, beautifully mounted and in- 
laid with silver : among the chasing of it he could see en- 
graved lines : he could distinguish his own name and Signa’s, 
— the one he knew the look of, having seen it so often on 
summons-papers for mad deeds done against the petty laws of 
his commune ; the other he knew because it was painted over 
the railway-place upon the hill. He could decipher Bruno — 
Signa ; and he guessed the rest : a date, no doubt, and some 
few words of memory or lov^ 

He sat still a little while, the gun lying on his knees ; there 
was a great darkness on his face. Then he gripped it in both 
hands, the butt in one, the barrel in the other, and dashed the 
centre of it down across the round of his great grindstone. 

The blow was so violent, the wood of the weapon snapped 
with it across the middle, the shining metal loosened from its 
hold. He struck it again, and again, and again ; until all the 
polished walnut was flying in splinters, and the plates of sil- 
ver, bent and twisted, falling at his feet ; the finely-tempered 
steel of the long barrel alone was whole. 

He went into his wood-shed, and brought out branches of 
acacia brambles, and dry boughs of pine, and logs of oak, 
dragging them forth with fury. He piled them in the empty 
yawning space of the black hearth, and built them one on 
another in a pile, and struck a match and fired them, tossing 
pine-cones in to catch the flames. 

In a few minutes a great fire roared alight, the turpentine 
in the pine-apples and fir boughs blazing like pitch. Then he 
fetched the barrel of the gun, and the oaken stock, and the 
silver plates and mountings, and threw them into the heat. 


448 


SIQNA. 


The flaming wood swallowed them up ; he stood and 
watched it. 

After a while a knock came at his house-door. 

“ Who is there ?” he called. 

“ It is I,” said a peasant’s voice. “ There is so muchi smoke, 
I thought you were on fire. I was on the lower hill, so I ran 
up. Is all right with you ?” 

“ All is right with me.” 

“ But what is the smoke?” 

“ I bake my bread.” 

“ It will be burnt to cinders.” 

“ I make it, and I eat it. Whose matter is it ?” 

The peasant went away muttering, with slow unwilling feet. 

Bruno watched the fire. 

After a brief time its frenzy spent itself; the flames died 
down ; the reddened wood grew pale, and began to change to 
ash ; the oaken stock was all consumed ; the silver was melted 
and fused into shapeless lumps ; the steel tube alone kept shape 
unchanged, but it was blackened and choked up with ashes, 
and without beauty or use. 

Bruno watched the fire die down into a great mound of dull 
gray and brown charred wood. 

Then he went out, and drew the door behind him, and 
locked it. 

The last red rose dropped, withered by the heat. 


CHAPTER XLVIII. 

February days are in the Signa country often soft as the 
May weather of the north. 

The trees are setting for leaf, the fields are green, the moun- 
tains seem full of light ; the birds sing, and the peasants too ; 
the brooks course joyously down the hills, the grass is full of 
snow-drops and the pearly bells of the leuconium and millions 
of violets pale and purple ; there are grand sunsets with almost 
the desert red in them, and cold transparent nights, in which 
the greatness of Orion reigns in its fullest glory, and watching 
for the dawn there hangs that sad star which we call^ the Ser- 


SIGNA. 


449 


pent’s Heart, and the Arabian astrologers called The Solitary 
One. 

The stars were still out when Bruno rose from his short, 
troubled, lonely sleep, and went out to his work as was his 
wont. 

He worked early and late. There was nothing else for him 
to do. 

He was consumed with impatience and anxiety, but he 
labored on in his fields. To leave them never occurred to him. 
The sailor in mid-ocean is not more chained to one narrow 
home than Bruno was by habit and custom and narrowness 
of knowledge to his high hill-tops. 

A fever of desire to hear, to see, to learn, to make sure, 
consumed him. He ate his very heart away with the gnawing 
wish to know the worst. But Borne was as vague to him and 
as far off as the white moon that faded away over his pine- 
woods as the daylight waned to noon. 

On his own land, in his own labor, he was a strong skillful 
man, able to cope with any labor and turn aside any disaster. 
But away from his own soil he knew nothing. Custom and 
ignorance hang like a cloud between the peasant and the outer 
world. He is like the ancient geographers of old, who feared 
to step off the shore they knew, lest they should fall into an 
immeasurable, incomprehensible abyss. 

Bruno would have walked through fire or plunged headlong 
in the sea to serve or save the boy ; but the lack of knowledge 
paralyzed him. Borne to him was far off as the stars : he 
could only work and wait, and rise in the dark coldness before 
morning, haunted with nameless fear, and counting the dull 
dead days as they dragged on, and meeting the sacristan who 
said always, “ He does not write : — oh, that is because all is 
well : when young things are happy they forget.” 

Once or twice he took out a handful of money from off the 
copper pitcher set behind the chimney -bricks, and went to his 
priest. “ When we pay for masses for the dead, it does them 
good ?” he said. “ Hell if they be in it gives them up, — lets 
them loose : is it not so?” 

“ Most certainly, my son,” said the old pastor. 

“ Then can we not buy them for the living ? There is hell 
on earth,” said Bruno, and emptied out his handful of curled 
yellow notes, and looked at his priest with wistful pitiful eyes. 

38 * 


450 


SIQNA. 


“ Tell me what the trouble is,” said the Parroco, who was 
the best and kindliest of souls, and had always had a weakness 
for this sinner whom he had confessed and shriven every 
Easter for so many years. 

“ I am not sure what it is,” said Bruno, and told him what 
he knew. 

“ Masses will do nothing, since there is a woman,” said the 
old priest, sadly. 

“ Are women stronger than hell, then ?” 

“ I have lived seventy years ; and I think so. But it is not 
a case for masses. Prayer for your lad I will say with my 
full heart’s willingness. But put up your notes. I will not 
take them.” 

But Bruno would leave them on the little wooden seat of 
the sacristy. “ Give them away in charity,” he said: “per- 
haps Heaven will remember it to the boy.” And he would 
leave them there. 

“We may get a soul out of purgatory ; but a lad out of a 
woman’s toils, — that is harder,” thought the priest ; but he 
only said, rolling up the notes, “ I will make sick folks happier 
with them, Bruno, since you wish it. That can neither harm 
you nor him.” 

“ Pray for him ; never mind me,” said Bruno, simply, and 
he left the little old red church, with its high crumbling 
tower, where the daws built, and the owls, and the beautiful 
blue-jays. 

■ It was a little solace to him that prayer should rise up there 
in the stillness of the hills, and pass out of the narrow windows 
with the wind, and go up through the sunshine and the clouds 
to where they said God and the saints were. Who knew what 
it might do ? 

But it gave little rest to the anxious, troubled, heavy soul 
of the man. Nature had made Bruno for action: to pray and 
hope and trust and wait resigned was a woman’s way \ it was 
not his. 

The bitter ferocity, too, with which he had broken and 
burned the gun had not passed away. With Bruno nothing 
pjissed. His passions were flames which burned their passage 
indelibly. He kept the secret of his pain in his own mind 
unspoken ; but the rage with which he had destroyed what 
had seemed to him as insult — as payment in base metal when 


SIGN A. 


451 


the gold of remembrance and of affection was withheld, — that 
rage chafed in him always. 

He never opened his lips to blame Signa. He never let any 
one in his hearing say they marveled at Signa’s forgetfulness 
of him. When any man said within earshot of him that it 
was strange that the boy should have passed a night in the 
city and never sent any tidings home, Bruno had answered 
him sharply, “ The lad has great things to think of ; he be- 
longs to all the world now, not to one hill-top ; when I com- 
plain of him others may do so too ; till then let them have a 
care.” And people, knowing his humors, were afraid, and never 
said a slighting word, but supposed that Bruno was content. 

But the fury with which he had thrust the rifle into the 
fire consumed him always. The gift — hurting him like a 
blow, cast to him as it seemed like so much wage — had dug a 
chasm between him and the boy he loved. 

Any other time he might have taken it as a symbol of 
grateful tenderness. But now — when Signa forsook him — it 
added a sting to the sharpness of his pain under neglect. It 
seemed to him the very insolence of success of triumph of 
riches, which said, “ So my debts are paid.” 

In cold reason the next day, when he raked out the fire and 
found one silver plate unburned amidst the embers, he stamped 
it under his heel, and hurled it into the deep well at his door. 

Signa had had the unhesitating unhalting sacrifice of twenty 
years of his life, and thought to pay him by a gunsmith’s 
glittering toy ! 

That was how it seemed to him. 

So he worked on amidst the fields, and let the days go : 
between him and the boy there was a gulf of silence. Bruno’s 
heart revolted against him. He asked himself why he had 
let the years go by, and lived without woman’s love, and the 
laughter of children, and that good will of men which comes 
from easy spending, that Pippa’s son might have his way and 
pay him with forgetfulness. Why had he consumed a score 
of years in rigid self-denial, ceaseless labor, and barren soli- 
tude for this boy's sake, only in the end to be abandoned for 
the first wanton face that smiled, and recompensed with such 
reward as careless princes give the forest-guards that drive 
their game ? 

Yet the great loyal love in him cleaved even to what he 


452 


SIGNA. 


thought thankless and thoughtless and forgetful. He still 
would have bought Signa’s peace at any price of his own body 
or soul ; he still said to the priest, “ Pray for him ; for me it 
does not matter.” 

But in the short soft days and in the long cold nights there 
was a heavy darkness always on him. Once he said to the 
priest, — 

“ If she take him from me, there is no God.” 

As he toiled in his fields with the fragrance of the coming 
spring in all the soil, he turned and look^ed across at the low 
lines of the hills, and felt his heart like a stone, his feet like 
lead. 

One fresh chill daybreak, as he worked with the silver dew 
on every blade of grass and spread like a white veil over all 
the hills, his brother’s voice called him. 

Looking up, he saw Lippo. He stood on the other side of 
one of the low stone walls that are built across the sloping 
fields to stay the force of water coming from the heights in 
winter rains. 

Bruno did as he had done ten years and more, he worked 
on, and seemed never to see the figure of his brother between 
him and the light. 

They met a hundred times a year and more ; Bruno did 
always so. For him Lippo had ceased to live. 

The priest had urged him vainly to forgiveness. 

“ Who cannot hate, cannot love,” Bruno had answered 
always. “ Forgetfulness is for women. Forgiveness is for 
dogs. I have said, it.” 

“ Bruno, may I speak a word to you?” said Lippo, gently. 
He had his softest and most pensive face ; his eyes were tender 
and regretful ; his voice was calm and kindly ; in his boot he 
had slipped a knife, for fear — no one could tell — Bruno was 
violent, and he had left his cowherd in the lower fields within 
a call ; but in his look and attitude Lippo had the simplest 
trustfulness and candor. He seemed oppressed and sorrowful ; 
that was all. 

Bruno went on and worked as he had done on the day that 
he had heard his brother was the owner of the neighboring 
land. He was cutting his olive-trees. He slashed the branches 
and flung them from him with force, so that if they would 
they might strike Lippo in the face. 


SIGNA. 


453 


Lippo watched the gleaming steel play in the gray leaves, 
and was glad he had bethought him to slip that knife within 
his boot. 

“ Bruno,” he said, very gently, “ do not be in haste or rage. 
I come in all true brotherliness ; the saints are my witnesses. 
You have been in anger against me many years. Some of 
your anger was just ; much unjust. I could not defend myself 
from your accusations of having dealt ill with Pippa’s child 
unless I had blamed Nita ; and what husband can shield himself 
at his wife’s cost ? Poor soul ! She has many virtues, but 
her hand is rough, and her tongue harsh, and mothers think 
it a merit to beat other children to benefit their own. A 
woman’s virtue is locked up in the cupboard by her own 
hearth -stone. Nita has been an honest wife to me ; but she 
has — a temper.” 

Bruno slashed a great bough from his tree, and flung it 
downward ; it struck Lippo. He moved aside, blinded for the 
moment, then went gently on. 

“ A temper : — oh, I know it, none §o well. No doubt the 
poor child suffered from it, and were it not that in marriage 
one must serve a wife at every hazard, and take her wrong- 
doing as one’s own, I could have proved to you with ease that 
what you thought my treachery was none of mine, but bitter 
pain and grief to me ; ay, indeed. Again and again I have 
gone supperless to give the little lad my portion. You know 
I never was master in my house. The money has always been 
hers and her father’s. Never once have they let me forget 
that, though Baldo is a good soul in much.” 

Bruno descended from his ladder, lifted it from the tree upon 
his shoulder, and turned to leave his olives, as though there 
were no man speaking or waiting on the other side of the wall. 
He would not waste words on Lippo, and if he looked at him 
he knew that he would do some evil on him, — this brother 
who had cheated him and got his land. 

He shouldered his ladder, and turned to mount the sloping 
field. 

“ Wait !” cried the other. “ Bruno, as surely as we are sons 
of one mother, I come to you in all amity.” 

Bruno went on up the hill. 

“ Bruno, wait !” cried Lippo. “ By the Lord above us, 1 
come with good intent.” 


454 


SIGN A. 


Bruno did not pause, nor look back. 

He went by up the slope of the grass-lands, leisurely, as 
though there were no one near. 

“ But if I come to make amends ?” said Lippo. 

Bruno laughed, a short deep laugh, fierce as a fierce dog’s 
bite, and went on his way against the glittering dews of the 
rising ground. 

Lippo cried to him from the wall, — 

“ But I have journeyed up from Borne.” 

Borne ! Involuntarily, unconsciously, Bruno stopped, and , 
turned his head over his shoulder. The name of the city 
struck him like a shot. It was the last word he would have 
dreamed of hearing. It was the place forever in his mind. 
It was the dim, majestic, terrible world that Argol shone on 
in the frosty nights. 

Lippo, who had never traveled beyond the hills round the 
Lastra and the town-walls of Florence, had journeyed back 
from Borne ! 

In the natural movement of surprise and wonder he halted 
a moment under the olive-trees and looked bapk. 

Lippo took that one moment of riveted attention. He 
leaped the wall lightly, and joined his brother. 

“Bruno, as I live, I come to make amends. I want to 
speak to you about the boy. If you will not listen, it is he 
who will suffer. He destroys himself — there.” 

Bruno halted. Mechanically he shifted the ladder from his 
shoulder, and set it up against the nearest tree. He was taken 
by surprise. He was forced to show his sense of his brother’s 
presence and his brother’s words. He was shaken out of his 
stern self-control, his impenetrable reticence. Do what he 
would, he felt his face pale, his eyes fail under Lippo’s. Pas- 
sionate questions sprang to his lips ; but how could he trust a 
traitor and a liar ? 

In the instant of his hesitation, Lippo spoke. 

“ I have been down to Borne. On business. To place my 
son in trade there. Nay, listen. All the city will tell you I 
speak truth. Of course I heard of Signa. It was impossi- 
ble not to hear. At the Apollo they play his Actea ; all the 
town is full of him. Of his great genius no one can say 
enough. But if some means be not found to save him, he 
will be destroyed, body and soul. A woman has hold of h'.m. 


SION A. 


455 


He only lives for her. I caught sight of him once two nights 
ago ; he was with her in the moonlight. He looks so changed ; 
one would not know him for that happy, simple lad of our last 
autumn time. Listen. All boys have follies. This might 
pass as such a folly does. But it will not do so, — no. Be- 
cause this woman is not as others are. She is the vilest of 
the vile, but beautiful : — the saints forgive me, but, when I 
saw her, I felt one might do any crime for such a face as that. 
They call her Innocence ! In mockery, no doubt. For they 
say there is no living thing more cruel than she is, nor more 
depraved, nor more voracious of all kinds of wealth. That 
is the worst. This woman is rich. The boy is poor. You 
know what they will say : he lives upon her, or they say he 
does. I know it is not true. Your Signa is too proud and 
pure for that. But, still, they say ; and great men, while they 
praise his genius, look askance on him, — so I hear. Nay, it 
is a sorcery. A strong will would break from it. But the lad 
is not strong. When Grod gives genius, I think he makes the 
brain of some strange glorious stuff, that takes all strength 
out of the character and all sight out of the eyes. Those 
artists, — they are like the birds we blind : they sing, and 
make people weep for very joy to hear them, but they cannot 
see their way to peck the worms, and are forever wounding 
their breasts against the wires. No doubt it is a great thing 
to have genius : but it is a sort of sickness, after all ; and 
when love comes ” 

Bruno, standing with his back against the olive, heard his 
brother’s voice run on, and did not stop him. His eyes were 
fastened with anxious, hungry pain on Lippo’s face. He knew 
that Lippo spoke the truth. 

“ The boy lias amorous fancies, like any other,” he mut- 
tered. “ Why not? Why not? You hate him, because you 
wronged him. Therefore you make much from little. You 
lie now ; you always lied. Gret you gone, — while I let you go 
in peace.” 

Lippo sighed. 

Nay, Bruno, it is you who do wrong to me. Why should 
I come and tell you this ? It cannot pleasure me, nor hurt 
me. Only one has some natural affections, some bowels of com- 
passion : and he was poor Pippa’s son ! I do not blame the 
lad, — a boy like that. And if you saw the beauty of the 


456 


SIGNA. 


woman ! Only, I said to myself, Bruno sliould know of this; 
and, rather than ask a stranger to meddle in it, I came myself. 
Because he is the woman’s toy, her tool, her fool, her slave. 
He does nothing with his time. He never touches pen nor 
lute, nor anything of art. I hear she says to him, ‘ Give me 
a rival in your art, I leave you.’ And he, to do her will, flings 
all his life away. Some say she loves him really. Some say 
that it is only wantonness, because the world talks of him ; and 
BO she likes to rule him, and, in a month or two, will break his 
heart, and send him out a beggar and an idiot. Nay, I say 
nothing more than all Rome says ; in truth, not a tithe so 
much. It is the common gossip of the streets. The woman 
is rich. She has had great lovers, princes and the like. The 
boy is known to live under her roof, to be lapped in luxury ; 
—you know what men will say.” 

Bruno sprang forward and seized his brother by the shoul- 
ders, in an iron grasp. 

“ It is a lie of Rome ! — a lie, a lie ! They grudge my boy 
his glory, and so they stone him thus, and fling their mud 
upon him !” 

“It is not a lie. Think : is he not silent to you ? Is he 
frank with you, and glad, and truthful, as of old? It is true, 
terribly true : a woman has bewitched him.” 

“ As God lives, do you say this in honesty and pity, or bru- 
tally to triumph in his weakness ?” 

Lippo looked him full in the eyes, candidly. 

“ In honesty and pity.” 

Bruno gazed in his brother’s face. Lippo’s eyes met him in 
steadiness and sorrow. Bruno let him go, and stood stupefied, 
mastering, as best he could, his own sulFering, lest Lippo 
should read it and be glad. In his heart he knew that the 
story brought from Rome was true. 

Lippo took up his narrative ; he had a sweet, pathetic voice, 
and skill in speech, like almost all his countrymen. 

“ Bruno, I know I have offended you ; nay, more, wronged 
you, in the days gone by. I am poor, among crafty well-to-do 
folks, who goad me on ; I have many children ; I have a 
troubled home and noisy hearth. I know I have thought too 
much of getting on in life, and laying by, and so was untrue 
to your trust sometimes, and so lost your confidence, — justly. 
That I see now. And you have been harsh and violent. You 


SIGN A. 


457 


cannot gainsay that. But, as the angels watch us this hour in 
heaven, I have no single thought but the boy’s good in what 
I tell you now. He is so young. He is soft-hearted as a girl. 
He is alone in a great, turbulent world, that first turned his 
head with flattery and homage and then reviles him the first 
moment that he falls. They tell me it is always so. The world 
is a spoiled princeling, and the genius in it is the dog it first 
flings cakes to and then bids go drown. They say so. But I 
think Signa may be saved. He is so young. It cannot be 
that this sudden passion has killed all natural, innocent love 
and gratitude in him. That is impossible : his heart is good : 
even to me — whom you had made him hold as his foe — he was 
most gentle always. It cannot be he has forgotten all he 
owes to “you, or would be altogether deaf to what you urge on 
him. It cannot be that all old memories and old affections 
are dead in him.” 

^ Bruno stood with the gray wood and leaves of the old 
olive-tree behind him ; his head was bent ; his face was very 
white, under the brown hues from the sun ; his lips quivered 
under the dark, drooping hair ; he strove to seem calm, but 
Lippo read the pain that tortured him. 

“It is too true, indeed,” said Lippo. “ Where a woman is 
and the love of her, there reason has no hold, and gratitude 
no abiding-place. And she is beautiful. She makes you 
dizzy, even seeing her go by in the moonlight, you standing 
in the gutter. After our brown, dusky, sturdy maidens, that 
white wonder seems more than a woman, — somehow. They 
rave of her in Borne. It seems she has abandoned all her 
mighty lords, and dotes on Signa ; and they do say, too, that 
in a month or two she will veer round and laugh at him, and 
take up her lords again ; and then — there will be worse evil 
still. Because the boy is mad for her, and believes her all she 
is not. When he learns the truth there will be trouble ; and 
any day may show it. When her fancy ends, then what will 
become of the lad ? I spoke to an old man, whom my friend 
knew, one of the flute-players of the opera-house, and he 
told me that they think the boy’s genius will die out alto- 
gether : he cares for nothing. — only for the woman and her 
whims and will. It is a sorcery. Signa is not like other 
youths. He was always thinking of the angels, and of all man- 
ner of strange sights and sounds, that none but himself could 
u 39 • 


458 


SIGNA. 


ever see or hear. Now that he loves this woman as he loved 
his music, it will go hard with him. ' Because a wanton can- 
not ever love. That grown men know.” 

Bruno was silent. His face moved with a great emotion 
that he had no longer power to conceal ; he could no longer 
affect to doubt his brother’s words, or deny the things they 
spoke of ; the misery and danger for the boy spread be- 
fore him as if they were written on the limestone hill and on 
the cloudless winter sky ; he forgot all else. 

His brother’s treacherous deeds against himself paled into 
nothing; his true and loyal faith to Pippa’s son made his 
own wrongs grow as naught to him ; he would have let a 
snake bite him to serve Signa. So he let the triumph of Lippo 
sting him, thinking only of the peril of the boy. 

“ Why have you come to say all this to me ? You have 
hated the boy, and been false to him and to me. Of all this 
— if it be true — you are glad.” 

“ Nay ! God knows you wrong me !” cried Lippo, as with 
a burst of generous indignation, of pained sincerity. “ You 
wrong me cruelly. The poor boy I never hated : heaven and 
earth ! — why should I ? I doubted that he was Pippa’s son. 
I did believe him yours. But either way he was my kith and 
kin. I erred. I say so. No man can do more. But chiefly 
I erred through weakness, letting a too violent woman have 
her way in my little household. I have admitted my fault 
there. I did not continue loyal to your trust as I should have 
done. I sacriflced duty to the sake of keeping peace at home. 
In a word, I was a coward. You who are brave as lions are 
have furious scorn for that. But, Bruno, as we are sons of 
one sainted mother, my heart is free of every taint of bitter- 
ness against you or the boy. I have been proud of his great- 
ness. Any ray of it is so much light and honor on us all. 
I grieve, as any creature with human blood in him would do, 
to know that all his future has been put in pawn to a vile 
woman. I come to tell you because I said, How should he 
hear anything on that lonely hill ? And because I thought 
that if you saw him — went to him — some change might come, 
or you might save him from some rash, mad deed, when he 
finds out what thing it is he worships. That is why I come. 
Upbraid me if you will ; but do not doubt me.” 

“ Do you know more of her?” 


SIGNA. 


459 


“ Nothing more.” 

“ Where does she come from?” 

“ From France, I think.” 

“ She is called that name — Innocence ?” 

“Yes.” 

“ It is the same woman whose likeness was shown in the 
town yonder?” 

“ That I do not know.” 

“ A man called Istriel painted her.” 

“ That I do not know either : I only know what I have 
told you.” 

“She passes for rich ?” 

“ She is rich.” 

“ How long has — he — been with her ?” 

“ Two months, — or something more ; so they say.” 

“ Where does she live ?” 

“ At a palace called the Sciallara, going up by what they 
call the Campidoglio.” 

“ That is hard to remember. Write it.” 

Lippo took out a torn letter and a pencil, and, making the 
wall his desk, wrote it in the clumsy handwriting which he 
had taught himself late in life. “ You will do nothing rash,” 
he said, pleadingly, as he gave the paper. 

Bruno took it. 

“ I cannot tell what to do.” 

His face was dark and weary; his breath came quickly; 
his eyes had a sort of piteous wish for counsel in them ; he 
was so utterly ignorant of what course to take. He could not 
see his way. He would have grasped any hand as a friend’s 
that could have led him through the darkness. 

“ I wish I had not told you,” said Lippo, with sudden 
candid self-rebuke and regret in his vexed tones. “ Perhaps 
I should have held my tongue. But it seemed horrible. To 
know the lad in such a woman’s power, and not to speak of it 
to you, to whom he is the very apple of the eye, though he 
forgets so ” 

Bruno winced, as a brave steer that has borne the heat and 
labor of the day unflinchingly winces at the fly that stings 
him in the wrung nostril, where the iron is. “ You did right 
to tell me,” he said, simply. “ It was good in you and honest.” 

“ I asked the grace of heaven on it,” answered Lippo. 


460 


SIGNA. 


Bruno looked at him. 

Lippo’s eyes met his with clear and honest candor. 

A short troubled sigh heaved Bruno’s chest quickly for a 
moment. 

“ I must think,” he muttered, and he turned and took the 
ladder on his shoulder, and began to mount the hill. 

“ Stay, Bruno,” said his brother, “ stay one moment. We 
have been sundered so long. Tell me we are friends.” 

Bruno looked at him, turning his head, as he went slowly 
up the grass between the olives. His own eyes were very 
sad, and had a heavy dark reproach in them. 

“ I am not a man to forget,” he said. “ A foe is a foe — 
always — to me ; a traitor always a traitor. But if you mean 
well by the lad, and would save him, I will forgive you if I 
can.’’ 

Then he went onward. 

Lippo stood silent ; a little faint smile came on his mouth. 

“ He will go to Rome,” he thought. 

Suddenly Bruno turned once more and came downward to 
him with a swift stride. The generous, fierce, tender nature 
of him welled up in a sudden warmth and emotion. 

“ Lippo, you have done good now : it shall cancel the evil. 
I cannot forget ; it is not in me to forget ; but if I save the 
boy we will live in fellowship. You stole the land, — yes. But 
I will ask God’s grace to wash that out of mind with me. If 
you mean well by the lad, that is enough.” 

He stretched his hand out : Lippo took it. 

Then they parted. 

Bruno went upward to his house, leaving the olive-trees 
untouched. 

Lippo went downward into the Lastra. 

“ He will go to Rome,” he thought, “ and he will quarrel 
with the boy, or kill the wanton.” 

And he smiled, going through the buoyant springtide air, 
as the western wind blew keen from the mountains. 

Lippo knew that wise men do not do harm to whatever they 
may hate. 

They drive it on to slay itself 

So without blood-guiltiness they get their end, yet stainless 
go to God. 

Lippo, content, walked on in the brilliant sunshine of the 


SIGNA. 


461 


early morning ; he smiled on children as he passed them, and 
gave a beggar money. As he went back he saw Palma carry- 
ing up linen to wash in the washing-place behind her on the 
hill-side. 

‘‘ Shall I tell her?” thought he, and he paused a moment. 
But Lippo was a kindly man when he had no end to serve by 
being cruel ; and he disliked giving pain, unless he gained 
something by it. He had soft words and gentle deeds for 
everybody when they cost him nothing. So he went on, and 
left Palma in ignorance, — Palma, who every year, on the feast 
of the dead, prayed for her sister as for one safe in heaven. 


CHAPTER XLIX. 

A LITTLE later the girl had her linen plunged in the cold 
deep water, and stood washing with half a dozen other women. 
To keep her brothers from want and a roof over all their 
heads, she had to take any and all work as it came, the rough 
with the smooth. She got a little something, — washing the 
shirts and shifts of peasants too busy with field-work to have 
time to do it for themselves; and Palma’s linen was always 
white, and always was well wrung out and dried. 

Here and there on the hills there are these big water-places, 
like the stone tanks that the women wash at in the streets of 
Rome. Only these tanks upon the hills are in wide sheds, 
and have the green country shining through the doors of 
lattice-work. 

Palma was washing among the other women : the water 
was splashing and bubbling, the sun was shining, the wind 
was whistling, the tongues were chattering; she alone of all 
was silent, her bare arms in the cold brown pool. 

“You are wanted,” the women said to her, surprised, for 
no one ever wanted her, unless, indeed, as they wanted the 
mule or the cart-horse : she left the linen soaking, and went 
outside the wooden door. 

Bruno stood there. 

He put a little picture in her hand. 

39 * 


462 


SIGNA. 


“Have ever you seen any one like that?” he asked her, 
covering all but the face of it. Palma’s brown cheek grew 
ashen : then the blood rushed over her forehead. 

“ What is it? Where did you get it?” 

“ Whom is it like ?” 

“ It is like — Gemma ; only it is a woman.” 

“ Yes, it is a woman.” 

He laughed a little, and took his hand away and left the 
figure of the dancer of Istriel visible. 

Palma colored over her throat and up to her dusky growing 
hair. 

“ It is a shameful woman. Oh, why did you show me that ?” 

“ It is only a picture,” said Bruno, moodily, and he pitched 
it into the water that flowed and foamed outside the washing- 
house. She caught his arm. 

“ Why did you show it me? Do you know anything? Do 
you mean anything ?” 

“ Nothing. It is only a picture.” 

And he walked away. 

She leaned over the tank and reached and plucked it out 
from the water ; it was a photograph, and the moisture ran 
off, and did not harm it. She stood and looked at it. She 
was alone against the white brick wall ; her rough blue skirt 
clung wet and close to her ; she had a red handkerchief over 
her short cropped hair ; the wind blew over her naked feet 
and her bared arms; the wide green hills were behind her, the 
brown wooden door of the shed before her ; there was a cold 
azure sky above the golden leafless trees. 

She stood and looked at the picture. Her face burned, 
though she was all alone. She shuddered and hated it. 

“He is a hard, cruel man,” she said. “How could he 
bring me such a thing ? My Gemma is safe with Christ.” 

Then she threw the picture in the water again, and as it 
floated put a great stone on it and sunk it, and as it rose, flung 
another greater stone, and then another, and then another, 
until the picture dropped under it like a drowned dead thing, 
and lay at the bottom with the mud and weeds. She felt as 
if she slew a, devil. 

“ My Gemma is with Christ,” she said, and she went back 
to the washing-women and the hard work and the coarse linen, 
while the winter sun shone, and the winter wind blew. 


SIGNA. 


463 


CHAPTER L. 

Bruno went straightway to his steward, and told him that 
he was about to go to Rome. 

It was as base to him to leave his land as it is to the 
soldier to desert his post. 

The land was more than your mother, so he thought ; it 
fed you all your life long, and gave you shelter when you 
were dead and men would have you cumber their households 
no more. He loved every clod of the good sound earth, and 
every breath of its honest fresh fragrance. He looked to lie 
in it when he should be buried and gone forever by the side 
of Dina, under the pines, with his feet resting forever on the 
mountain-side, that they had trodden so long. He had always 
a fancy that in his grave there he should know when the corn 
was springing and feel the soft rainfall. 

The love of the country was in his blood, in his brain, in 
all the soul he had. He could not comprehend how life 
would go on with him elsewhere. He was rooted to his birth- 
place as an oak is to its forest. 

Nevertheless he tore himself away. 

He did not know what penalty might avenge, what fate 
might follow, his desertion of the soil. His lord might be 
furious. His possessions might be pillaged. When he re- 
turned he might find himself ruined, ejected, displaced, — if he 
returned at all, — if — who could tell ? 

The thing he did was, to him, as if he stepped off a great 
precipice into the emptiness and nothingness of silent and 
unfathomable air. 

His bones might be broken in the fall, and his very exist- 
ence cease to be. 

Nevertheless he went : as he would have leaped otF an 
actual height down into unknown space, if by so doing he 
could have saved the boy. 

In the white marble of the great Borghese sculpture, Cur- 
tius leaps down, and the world hails a hero: — no one saw 


464 


SIGN A. 


Bruno, or would have praised him had they seen, yet the 
courage was scarcely less, and the sacrifice nearly as absolute. 

Indeed the hero saw glory in the bottomless abyss and 
darted to it : — the peasant saw nothing except impenetrable 
gloom and hopelessness. Yet he went ; because the son of 
Pippa was in peril. 

He went back to his homestead, and put all his things in 
order. 

It was high noon. 

He took out from its hiding-place his copper pitcher with 
his savings in it. They were not much in value. He had 
had only one harvest-time and one vintage to save from, since 
his all had been taken for the Actea. Such as they were, he 
stitched them in the waist-band of his trousers, and put a 
shirt or two up in a bundle, and so was ready for his journey. 
He would not go until evening. He worked all day, leaving 
everything as it should be, and, so far as it was possible, nothing 
for new hands to do ; except so far as seeing to the beasts 
went, that was of necessity a new care every day. 

He had been brought up on this great wooded spur looking 
down on the Signa country; all his loves and hatreds, joys 
and pains, had been known here; from the time he had plucked 
the maple-leaves in autumn for the cattle with little brown 
five-year-old hands, he had labored here, never seeing the sun 
set elsewhere, except on that one night at the sea. He was 
close rooted to the earth as the stone-pines were and the oaks. 
It had always seemed to him that a man should die where he 
took life first, among his kindred and under the sods that his 
feet had run over in babyhood. He had never thought much 
about it, but unconsciously the fibres of his heart had twisted 
themselves round all the smallest and the biggest things of his 
home, as the tendrils of a strong ivy bush fasten round a great 
tower and the little stones alike. 

The wooden settle where his mother had sat, the shrine in 
the house-wall, the copper vessels that had glowed in the wood- 
fuel light when a large family had gathered there about the 
hearth, the stone well under the walnut-tree where dead Dina 
had often stayed to smile with him, the cypress-wood presses 
where Pippa had kept her feast-day finery and her pearls, the 
old vast sweet-smelling sheds and stables where he had thrashed 
and hewn and yoked his oxen thirty years if one, — all these 


SIGN A. 


465 


things, and a hundred like them, were dear to him with all 
the memories of his entire life ; and away from them he could 
know no peace. 

He was going away into a great darkness. He had nothing 
to guide him. The iron of a wasted love, of a useless sacrifice, 
was in his heart. His instinct drove him where there was 
peril for Pippa’s son : — that was all. 

If this woman took the lad away from him, where was there 
any mercy or justice, earthly or divine? That was all he 
asked himself, blindly and stupidly ; as the oxen seem to ask 
it with their mild sad eyes as they strain under the yoke and 
goad, suffering and not knowing why they suffer. 

Nothing was clear to Bruno. 

Only life had taught him that Love is the brother of Death. 

One thing and another had come between him and the lad 
he cherished. The dreams of the child, the desires of the 
youth, the powers of art, the passion of genius, one by one 
had come in between him, and loosened his hold, and made 
him stand aloof as a stranger. But Love he had dreaded most 
of all ; Love, which slays with one glance dreams and art and 
genius, and lays them dead as rootless weeds that rot in burning 
suns. 

Now Love had come. 

He worked all day, holding the sickness of fear off him as 
best he could, for he was a brave man ; — only he had wrestled 
with fate so long, and it seemed always to beat him, and almost 
he grew tired. 

He cut a week’s fodder for the beasts, and left all things in 
their places, and then, as the day darkened, prepared to go. 

Tinello and Pastore lowed at him, thrusting their broad 
white foreheads and soft noses over their stable-door. 

He turned and stroked them in farewell. 

“ Poor beasts !” he muttered, “ shall I never muzzle and 
yoke you again ?” 

His throat grew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a man 
who sails for a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he nor 
any other can tell whether he will ever return. 

He might come back in a day ; he might come back never. 

Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at him. 
But to him it was as though he set forth on the journey T^Uich 
men call death, 
u* 


466 


SIGNA, 


In the gray lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their 
white brows ; thei^ was no one there to see his weakness, and 
year on year he had decked them with their garlands of hedge- 
flowers and led them up on Grod’s day to have their strength 
blessed by the priest, — their strength that labored with his 
own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields. 

Then he turned his hack on his old home, and went down 
the green sides of the hill, and lost sight of his birthplace as 
the night fell. 

All through the night he was borne away by the edge of 
the sea, along the wild windy shores, through the stagnant 
marshes and the black pools where the buffalo and the wild 
boar herded, past the deserted cities of the coast, and beyond 
the forsaken harbors of ^ne.as and of Nero. 

The west wind blew strong ; the clouds were heavy ; now 
and then the moon shone on a sullen sea ; now and then the 
darkness broke over rank Maremma vapors ; at times he heard 
the distant bellowing of the herds, at times he heard the moan- 
ing of the water ; mighty cities, lost armies, slaughtered hosts, 
foundered fleets, were underneath that soil and sea, whole 
nations had their sepulchres on that low wind-blown shore. 
But of these he knew nothing. 

It only seemed to him that day would never come. 

Once or twice he fell asleep for a few moments, and, waking 
in that confused noise of the stormy night and the wild water 
and the frightened herds, thought that he was dead, and that 
this sound was the passing of the feet of all the living multi- 
tude going forever to and fro unthinking over the depths of 
the dark earth where he lay. 


CHAPTER IL. 

LiPPO in this last lengthening day of February found hours 
of sunshine and of leisure to loiter in and out the Lastra doors, 
set open to the noonday brightness and the smell of the air 
from the hills, which brought the fragrance of a world of 
violets with it. 

Lippo, with sad eyes and softened voice, said to his gossips, — 


SIGNA. 


467 


“ My brother is gone down to Rome. Yes, — left the old 
house where we were born, and all his labors, and gone down 
to Rome. I dread the worst. Poor Bruno ! He has been an 
unbrotherly soul to me, and harsh and hasty, and has been 
misguided always and mistaken. But, before he went, he 
asked my pardon frankly, and you know when a man does 
that, bygones are bygones. I do not understand those hard 
hearts which never will forgive. Yes, I dread the worst. You 
see, the poor lad Signa has fallen in evil courses, and been 
taken in the coils of a base woman, and Bruno hears of it, and 
will go see for himself, and says that he will drag the boy from 
ruin though it cost bloodshed. I do dread the worst. Be- 
cause, you see, youths are not lightly turned from their mad 
passions, and Bruno is too quick of hand and heavy of wrath. 
It makes me very anxious. Oh, yes, indeed, I know he has 
had little love for me, and been unjust to me, and done me 
harm ; but when a man says that he repents, — it may be weak, 
but I for one could not refuse my hand. And between brothers, 
too. Indeed, I loved him always, and the poor boy knew 
that.” 

And Lippo sighed. 

“ What a heart of gold !” said the barber, looking after him 
as he went up the street. 

“ Ay, truly, tender as a woman, when you take him the 
right way,” quoth the butcher. 

“ And a man of thrift : money soon jumps itself treble in 
his pocket,” said Toto the tinman. 

“ And a good son of the church,” said the parish priest, 
who was passing by; and the barber nodded solemnly, and 
added, — 

“ And never a shrewder brain under my razor, with all the 
polls I have shaved as clean as pumpkins — forty years and one 
last St. Michael — in the Lastra.” 

Lippo went on to the sacristy of the Misericordia, where he 
had risen to be of good report, and one of the foremost men 
of the order, by dint of assiduous service in the black robes, 
and bearing to and from hospital or graveyard his sick or life- 
less fellow-creatures, and being constantly present at mass and 
requiem. 

There was a dead body lying up on the hills as far away as 
Mosciano, — the body of a poor sister of the order, a peasant- 


468 


SIONA. 


woman, — and the bier and catafalque were going out to fetch 
lier. One of the daily servitors, whose turn it was, had met 
with an accident to his foot in answering the summons. Lippo, 
with kindliest, quickest willingness, took his place, and bade 
the man go home and rest, and he would himself pay his fine 
of absence. 

Amidst blessings Lippo moved away under the black and 
dismal pall. 

“ A pure good Christian soul,” said the by-standers. “ It 
will be hard for such a man if his wild brother make a shame 
and scandal for him down in Rome.” 

From the Lastra to Mosciano is a long and toilsome way, 
winding up into the green hills and under the steep heights 
that are left as nature made them, and have the arbutus and 
the oak and the stone-pines growing at free will in beautiful 
dells and on bold rocky knolls that lie high under the skies, 
nameless, and rarely seen of men. There is infinite loveliness 
in these lonely, wild, richly-foliaged hill-tops, with the great 
golden valley far below, and beyond on the other side the 
shining plains by the sea. The day was fair; the opposite 
mountains were silvered with snow ; the fox and the wild hare 
ran across the solitary paths ; but it was cold ; the north wind 
blew, the ascent was steep, and the way seemed endless, lying 
along over the green chain of the high woods. The men, 
laboring under the weight of the bier, grew footsore and tired ; 
when they brought the poor dead sister down, and laid her in 
the chapel to await her burial on the morrow, the long hours 
of the day were already gone, — it was night. 

Lippo wiped the sweat from his forehead as he laid away 
his cowl ; he was aching in every limb, and his feet were cut 
and bruised, but he was well content. Those were the things 
which smelt sweet in the nostrils of his neighbors. To walk 
in a steam of good savor is, he knew, to walk soon or late to 
the goal of success. 

“You are not strong enough to take such exertion ; it 
was noble of you, but you overtask yourself,” said pretty 
Candida, the vintner’s wife, as he left the church ; and she 
would have him in, and made him warm himself beside her 
stove, and brewed him some coffee, and praised him, and 
hoped with a sigh that Nita knew her own good fortune and 
his worth. 


SIGN A. 


4G9 


“ Do not make me vain,” murmured Lippo, with a pathetic 
appeal in his soft lustrous eyes. “ Do not make me vain, — 
nor miserable.” 

And he said it so sweetly, and his hand stole so gently into 
hers, and his eyes were so eloquent and so plaintive, that 
pretty Candida was ready to promise him coffee — or aught 
else — whenever he passed that way. 

So Lippo went home, having done a good day’s work, and, 
meeting the vintner within a few yards from the door, pressed 
him by the hand warmly, and said — Was Candida well? he 
had not seen her for a week or more ; and being praised a 
little farther onward by the parish priest, said, He had done 
nothing ; oh, no ! Mosciano was a stretch, but what mattered a 
little fatigue when there was God’s labor to be done, and the 
saints’ pleasure ? and then, with modest denial of any virtue in 
himself, took a few farther steps, and mounted to the upper 
chamber, where his wife was sitting and waiting for him with 
a scowl and loud upbraiding. 

“ Nay, dear,” said he, “ do not be angered. Poor Tista hurt 
his ankle at the church, and so I took his turn in fetching a 
corpse down from the hills ; that is all. From Mosciano, — an 
endless way ; a day’s work, and a hard one, for a mule. I 
thought I should have died. And not a bit or drop passing 
my mouth since noonday, and it is nine of the clock. Dear, 
give me some wine, — quick : I feel faint.” 

And Nita, who loved him in a jealous, eager, tyrannous way, 
got him of the best, and waited on him, and roasted him some 
little birds upon a toast, and sorrowed over him. 

For she was a fierce-tongued, fierce-eyed, jealous creature, 
— but his dupe. The sharpest woman will be the merest fool 
of the man she loves, if he choose to fool her. 

“ There is a letter come for you,” said Nita, when the birds 
were eaten. 

A letter was a rarity in any household of the Lastra. 

Lippo broke it open, and slowly spelled it out, syllable by 
syllable. 

“.Heaven is good to us,” he said, softly, and laid it down by 
the brass lamp. 

“ What is in it ?” asked his wife, watching his face breath- 
lessly. 

“ Dear, your aunt, of most blessed memory, is dead ; God 
40 


470 


SIGNA. 


rest her soul ! She died of a stricture of the stomach, all in a 
moment. Would *I had been there! She leaves us all she 
had ; it seems she saved much ; her cottage at Assisi, and 
twenty thousand francs in scrip ; all to us — to me — without 
reserve.” 

Nita screamed aloud, with her black eyes all kindling with 
ferocious joy, and flung her brown arms about his neck and 
kissed him. 

“ Oh, Lippo I oh, Lippino ! How clever you are 1 To have 
thought of taking the silly old soul those conserves and cough- 
potions just in the nick of time 1 How clever 1 — I never will 
say you nay !” 

Lippo returned her caress, thinking the lips of Candida 
were softer. His face grew very grave, with a pensive reproach 
upon it. 

“Oh, my love, your words are unbecoming. You know full 
well I had no thought of after-gain in paying that poor soul 
the deference due to age. You know it pains me not to be in 
friendship with all our relatives, — and she so old too, it was 
only duty, Nita ; believe me, dear, when we do right, heaven 
goes with us. I am thankful, of course, that so much more 
is added to us to keep you and the children in good comfort ; 
but I would sooner far that the kind old creature were living 
and enjoying life, than gain this greater prosperity by her 
death ; and so, I know, would you, though your quick tongue 
outruns your heart and does belie it.” 

Nita suddenly drew back, and made unseen a grimace be- 
hind her husband’s handsome head. She began to feel he was 
her master. She began to realize her own clumsy inferiority 
to this delicate fine workmanship of his. 

“ Anyhow, the cough-syrup has brought good measure 
back 1” she muttered, her eyes still aglow. 

“ My journey to Rome, in my boy’s interests, has prospered, 
thanks to heaven,” said Lippo, with calm serious grace, and 
went and read the notary’s letter to old Baldo. 

“ You will be a warm man, Lippo,” chuckled the cobbler, 
who had grown very infirm and kept his bed ; “ a warm man. 
You will have all I have too, ere long.” 

“ May it be very long 1” said Lippo, and said it with such 
earnest, graceful tenderness that the old man, though he had 
known him tell lies morning, noon, and night for five and- 


SIGNA. 


471 


twenty years, was touclied, and almost thought that Lippo said 
the truth and meant it. 

“ Once,” said Baldo. “ 1 did wish that my girl had taken 
your mad brother. But now I know she chose aright. Yes, 
you are a man to prosper, Lippo.” 

“All things are with God,” said Lippo, and, tired though 
he was, sat down by the bed and spelt out aloud to the old man, 
who was drawing near his end and liked to be well with heaven, 
one of the seven psalms of penitence. 

The window-shutter was not closed ; a pretty woman, lean- 
ing in the opposite casement, could see, and a canon who dwelt 
on the other side of the thin wall could hear him. 


CHAPTEB LIT. 

It was threein the afternoon, from accident and delay, when 
Bruno, dazzled, stupefied, cold, and fasting, stumbled on his 
first steps on the stones of Rome. 

There was a sort of awe for him in Rome. 

He had been taught that it was there the great St. Peter 
always lived, and held the keys of heaven and hell. That 
was all. Other thoughts of Rome he had none ; and even 
that died out of him in the engrossing dread that possessed 
him of all he should learn here of the boy. 

He got down, and on his feet, and stared blankly across the 
square, and felt blind and bewildered with that sense of 
strangeness which overpowers beyond all other sense the igno- 
rant and the untraveled who alight in an unknown place. 

What had he come for ? He did not know. 

He came on the impulse which his brother had set alight 
in him, — the impulse to save Signa. 

The men and women who had come with him in that 
dreary journey went all their several ways with noise and 
tumult, quarreling and difficulty. Bruno stood stock still, like 
a lost dog in the midst of the uproar ; and it soon had ceased. 

“ Where are you going ?” said a man to him, who had a 


472 


SIGNA. 


horse and vehicle, and thought that he might need both, as 
other travelers did. 

Bruno stared at him, and, without answering, felt to make 
sure that both his belt and knife were safe. 

“You will be sick and sorry not to have taken me,” said 
the driver, irritated with the churlishness of silence. “ There 
is not another beast to be hired under its worth in scudi all 
over the city to-day : not one.” 

“What is there amiss in the city?” he asked. He was 
hungry, and felt a dizzy stupor in his head. 

The driver laughed outright. 

“ Oh, Tuscan gaby, where are your wits ? Is it not Shrove 
Tuesday ?” 

“ I forgot,” said Bruno, and stood still, wondering where he 
had best go. 

“Are you come to get a job on the Campagna?” said the 
man, knowing him to be a peasant, and guessing his province 
by his accent. “ You are too early. They come in by troops 
in another month, laborers like you.” 

Bruno moved away mechanically, as the lost dog will when 
some one teases it. 

It had been a mild and golden day, and the sun was now 
setting. 

The mists had been left with the marshes, and the clouds 
had blown away over the sea; the dark, lowering, windy 
weather had been left in the north ; and over Home there was 
a flood of amber, radiant light. 

The sunshine of Borne has a great influence in it. 

It makes happiness an ecstasy. 

It makes pain a despair. 

Bruno moved away in it, — a lofty, erect, dark figure, with 
his brown cloak on one shoulder. 

He wished the light were not so bright. The gray, sullen 
mists of the pools and the shores had hurt him less. 

Very soon his wish was fulfilled. The sun sank, and night 
fell. 

He had not tasted food or drink for fifteen hours. 

He saw a wine-house in a crooked street ; he went in and 
took a draught and ate a bit of bread and a few mushrooms ; 
then he went out again, the stupor of his brain clearing a little 
as his body was refreshed. 


SIGN A. 


473 


It was already quite dark. 

Undying Petrus dwelt here, and kept the keys of eternal 
life. So he had always been told. He did not doubt it. 

It made the city mysterious and half divine to him. That 
was all. Otherwise he was scarcely sensible of the difference 
of place. 

His mind was absorbed in his errand. 

Bruno would have moved unabashed and unconscious 
through all the palaces of the world ; and now, when he 
thought that he was where the Kegent of Christ dwelt, he said 
to himself, — 

“ If I could see him, I would tell him to shut me out for- 
ever, forever : it will not matter for me ; so that only the boy 
may go to God.” 

To Bruno heaven and hell were as two visible worlds : had 
not he seen them, one golden as morning, the other lurid as a 
tempestuous night, painted by great Orcagna, who had been 
suffered to behold them, as in a vision, and prefigure them for 
the warning of men ? 

He went through the lonely streets, pondering within him- 
self Their solemnity was welcome to him, and soothed the 
jagged, weary, impatient bitterness of his mind. 

A girl laughed above, in an open lattice behind a grating. 

He wondered to hear her. It seemed to him as if the city 
were a mighty grave in which sinners waited for judgment. 

He remembered hearing from the priests and preachers 
church-tales of the martyrs who had perished here for their 
faith. He envied them such death. 

If only they would take him so, and bind him and burn 
him, — if by such means he could save the boy. 

Those men were happy. They made their bond with God, 
and paid down their brief, fiery pang, and got eternal life by 
it, — or so they thought. 

Bruno envied them. He could only see the soul he loved 
drift into hell ; and could do nothing. 

He walked on, seeing the greatness round him as in a dream. 
The mind of the man was larger than the shell in which it 
had been imprisoned all its years. 

He was ignorant ; his brain had never gone out from its 
narrow confines of pastoral knowledge and of daily cares : but 
in it there was a certain unawakened power which, under other 
40 * 


474 


SIGNA. 


habits and under other modes of life, might have become 
strength and dignity of thought. 

As it was, his brain, dumb, fettered, confused, confined, was 
only pain to him, and of no more use than the lion’s force is 
to the lion born in an iron cage and doomed to live and die in 
one. 

It was quite night when he left the wine-house and walked 
onward. 

It was all dark. For Rome is ill lit at all times, and the 
streets are narrow and the walls are high, and the moonbeams 
only shine in here and there save when the moon is at her full 
and the white glory of her is spread everywhere like a phos- 
phorescent sea. 

It was all dark as Bruno passed along its unknown ways, 
his hand upon his knife. He made his way slowly, with a 
curious sense of something greater than himself, and greater 
than the world that he had known, around him. 

A vast stillness and obscurity reigned everywhere, but ever 
and again there loomed out from the gloom a thing of Rome, 
such as only Rome can give : a colossal statue, sombre and 
crowned, with the orb of the world at its feet ; a saint with 
gigantic crosier raised on high to awe into subjection the rulers 
of the universe ; a mighty form tiaraed and robed in travertine 
that gleamed to a red pale gold in the light of some solitary 
lamp ; a huge column fitted for the grip of Samson ; a dusky 
arch with wild grasses growing in its keystone, or a white 
fountain with its fantastic play of foam cast up in silver on 
the black background of towering walls or endless stairways. 
These and such as these gleamed ever and again out from the 
universal shadow. There was a vague nameless sense of im- 
mensity around. These statues were Titans frozen into stone ; 
the Sant’ Agnese was the full-breasted, fleet-footed daughter 
of a god ; this naked Gregorius had the brow and the loins 
of banished Zeus. 

These are all Rome gives at night: some prophet with out- 
stretched arms raised in imprecation ; some stern stone face of 
an Assyrian lion ; some Sphinx with cold and dreaming eyes 
that hold the mysteries of the lost races in them ; some 
Christian martyr with white marble limbs wound about a cross 
of bronze ; some Latin god with thyrsus broken in his hand 
and wine-cup filled with dust and ashes ; — these and their like 


SIONA. 


475 


gleam here and there, parted by great breadths of shadow and 
gloom of impenetrable darkness, where any crime may have 
been wrought and any woe been suffered. 

A strange perpetual sense of power and of measureless 
empire is still upon the air ; here all the passions and all the 
forces of humanity were once at their fullest and their fiercest ; 
here giants moved and breathed and worked and fought and 
had their being, and in their turn died, — died mortal-men also 
at the last, but to the last also in their sinew and substance, 
by their legacy and tradition, giants even in the silence and 
the impotence of death. 

Bruno, going through the night, and seeing these, was 
moved to a vague fear, such as even a bold man may feel 
entering a haunted house at midnight and alone. 

Borne had been once the throne of the world, and was now 
the refuge of God. 

That was all he knew. But it was enough. 

He wandered without knowing where he went, or whither 
he ought to go. 

Used to a fairy city, he was lost and bewildered in this city 
of giants. 

Until he had set foot in Borne, it had never come to his 
mind that the boy might be hard to find. 

“They must know of him at the Theatre of Apollo,” he 
said to himself ; and tried to reach the theatre ; and missed 
his way ; and came on what seemed to him most beautiful and 
most appalling, — a great arena strewn with fallen pillars and 
mutilated friezes, and with a carved column that alone stood 
erect, and seemed to tower to the clouds, and deep stone ways 
in which stagnant black water glittered ; and all around there 
was an intense stillness ; and above all there rose a mountain 
as it seemed of marble and brick and sculpture ; and over all 
was the silvery mist of the new-risen moon and wide sombre 
veils of shadow. 

It was the Forum of Trajan. 

And the mountain of stone was the back of the Capitol. 

Bruno, knowing nothing, thought it a vast sepulchre, whose 
tombs and temples had been overthrown in war. 

No living mortal met his eye. It seemed to him that spirits 
alone could have their dwelling there. 

All the thousands and tens of thousands were away in the 


476 


SIGNA. 


feasting of the grandest day of Carnival, — gathered together 
by the Pincian Hill. They had told him so ; but he forgot 
it as he went. 

The stillness, the vastness, the sadness of the mighty wilder- 
ness of stone in which he wandered oppressed him. He had 
been reared on the mountain-side, amidst the waving seas of 
corn, the fresh fragrance of woods, the width of the green 
valleys, and the smile of the wet wind-tossed pines. 

This maze of brick, this labyrinth of broken marble, was 
wonderful to him, and terrible to him. When he saw a green 
curled palm rising over the granite of a palace bastion, he 
could have stretched his arms to it as to a friend. 

Nature, living and laughing. Nature, eternal and ever tri- 
umphant everywhere else over all the works of men, — Nature 
is cowed and hushed in Pome. 

Men have cast such weight of stone upon her breasts that 
their milk is dry. 

She has crept slowly, as a bereaved childless creature might, 
over this vast battle-ground, and has covered with a green 
mantle the nakedness of the innumerable slain; but she is 
stilled and sterile in her office. She lies barren in the plains, 
and forsakes the city where the people so long ago denied her 
and turned to worship their gods of bronze and clay. 

He mounted the steep stairway and entered by it the grand 
granite desolation that saw Rienzi fall. 

It was all deserted. 

Through an arch where the moon-rays shone he saw a co- 
lossal river-god lying dark and prostrate. The cold, damp, 
lofty courts were all silent. The bronze Augustus sat alone, 
gazing over Pome. Castor and Pollux caught their great 
horses back on a field of stone. The stairways seemed meas- 
ureless and endless, shelving into the dim unknown depths of 
the silent city. 

Bruno shuddered. 

He was a brave man amidst mad cattle, furies of the flood, 
bare knives unsheathed in feud, or any bodily peril. But here 
ho was stupefied and afraid. 

Here, alone with this great past, of which he knew nothing. 

He doffed his hat to the bronze emperor erect there in his 
lonely grandeur. 

Was it a statue or a spectre ? He did not know. The air 


SIONA. 


477 


had grjwn very cold. On the vast steps which had felt the 
feet of millions the moonbeams were shining. 

When he saw at last a human form he was thankful. 

He spoke aloud. 

“ Where am I ? — tell me ?” 

The ascending shadow answered him. 

“ This is the Capitol.” 

“ Who is that? — who reigns in the midst?” 

“ Men called him Augustus, — lord of the world.” 

“ And those two that struggle with the horses ?” 

“ They are the Gemini. They ride in the heavens too. 
You may see them any night among the stars from tulip-time 
to vintage.” 

Bruno did not understand. 

Yet he felt that the words suited the place better than any 
bare bald answer, and he had sense enough to know that no 
common man spoke so. 

“ Do they ride with the stars ?” he said, doubtfully, half 
believing. 

“ Yes. All the summer long.” 

“ Are they stronger than Argol ?” 

“ What is Argol ?” 

“ A star of evil : so they say.” 

“ Then be sure they are not. Evil is always stronger than 
good.” 

Bruno made the sign of the cross, and stood silent, looking 
at the brothers straining at their steeds. 

The ascending figure, pausing too, looked at him. With 
his stature, his unconscious dignity of posture, his oval, olive 
face, his broad brows, his dark, fathomless gaze, he had a 
grandeur in him, though he had followed his oxen and trodden 
the plowed earth all his days. 

The other looked at him from head to foot. 

“ Do you fear that star, — your Argol?” 

“ It is to be feared,” said Bruno. 

“ Is it in your horoscope ?” 

“ What is that ?” 

“ It is a fate, read by the stars.” 

“ Is there such a thing?” 

“ No doubt. How else should any one have known that 
some stars are good, some evil ?” 


478 


SIGNA. 


“Where are the living people?” 

“ You must go onward for them. Take that way. You 
will find them by tens of thousands.” 

“ What do they do there?” 

“ They are at the Mocoletti.” 

“ What is that?” 

“ Fire-worship. In Egypt it was of old the Feast of Lamps.” 

“ But they worship Christ in Borne.” 

“ A few did, eighteen hundred years ago,” said the other, 
with a smile, and ascended the rest of the stairs. 

“ Is he the Evil One?” thought Bruno, with a chill, as he 
saw the smile in the moonlight. 

The stranger passed away into the empty space of the Cap- 
itol, and Bruno took his way through the darkness, leaving 
the heaven-born Gemini to wrestle with their coursers. 

He moved always in the direction which the other had 
pointed to him. For a time all was still, sombre, and solitary, 
frowning masses of masonry ascending to the skies on either 
side, with here and there the slender feathers of a palm cast 
up against the silver of the night. 

Then he came to a great battlemented brown pile, and to a 
continuous living stream of tumultuous people, and stood still 
with utter amaze ; for what he saw was a winding way of fire, 
which seemed to be without end, as though all the firefiies of 
the old Eastern world and the new Southwest had met there 
and there held revel. Clouds of starry little fiames were 
moving everywhere ; the earth was all alive with them, and 
the air ; a river of light stretched away, away, away, with 
cupolas and stairs and domes all ablaze in golden coruscations 
in the far distance ; whilst all along the channel of fire clusters 
and plumes of sparks flew and fought and whirled and sprang 
aloft, as though all the million stars of heaven had dropped to 
the lower air and were in battle. 

Bruno stood and gazed entranced, and doubting his own 
sight. 

It was only the great game of the Mocoletti. But in his 
own province Carnival knows not this crown and glory of the 
high feast-day ; and he had never heard of it, and could not 
comprehend the torrent of light that rushed down the long 
and crowded Corso towards him, and the mad uproar of shouts 
and cries that deafened him like the roar of cannon. 


SIGNA. 


479 


For a few moments lie stood and gazed agliast at the sight, 
whilst at the end of the river of flame the great round domes 
of the church, raised to lay Nero’s wandering soul at rest, 
gleamed like globes of light in the fiery rain of a thousand 
rockets. Then, as the fantastic cars and chariots passed him, 
their gay combatants armed with blazing wands, and as the 
grotesque masks and harlequins and dominoes flew by him, 
striking with their long tapers right and left, he saw that it 
was some feast of Carnival unknown to him, and tried to turn 
away from it and gain the solitude of some side street. For 
his heart was heavy and his brain was dull ; and the tumult 
and the mirth and the madness were hateful to him. 

But to escape from such a crowd was no longer possible. 
The Moccoli once lit at Ave Maria, the Homans are mad till 
the hist light dies. He was wedged in a multitude, whose 
numbers were swelled with every moment; the frightened 
horses, the great allegorical cars, the throng's of mas(|ueraders, 
the striking, dancing, nodding, flaming tapers, all hemmed him 
in, and pushed him upward almost off his feet, and bore him 
on by the force of the screaming and rapturous mob. The 
utmost he could do was to defend his face from blows, and his 
clothes from the flying fires. Against his will, he was carried 
along, higher and higher, under the crowded casements and 
balconies, nearer to the domes and the obelisks and the foun- 
tains glowing to gold and crimson in the feast of fire. 

When he at last got breathing-space and rest a moment, and 
leaned against an open doorway, to watch this strange fantastic 
war of flames, that seemed to make the very stones and walls 
and winds and clouds alive with it, he rested opposite a wide- 
open window, with a gallery running underneath it, and draped 
with gold cloths and furs and silken stuffs, more richly than 
any of those near it. A woman leaned her arms on the bal- 
ustrade, and gazed down on the sea of lights below, and with 
a long white wand, alight at the end, fought the lights under- 
neath her, and laughed as she moved it for the thousandth 
time, burning still, despite all efforts from the street to blow it 
out or strike it from her hand. 

She laughed as a little child might have done at the sport 
they made her; and many, looking upward, forgot their war- 
fare and let her vanquish them, because, in the flickering, fit- 
ful light of the countless flames, she looked so lovely, leaning 


480 


SIONA. 


there, as if the fire were burning in her and shining through 
her, as its flame in an alabaster lamp. 

Bruno looked up, as all the others did, seeing how the 
chariots paused and the faces were upturned and the wands 
were lowered under this one casement. 

He knew her in an instant: the wanton whose likeness 
Palma had flung under the water and stoned ; the child who 
had sunned her snowy little limbs in the long grass among 
the daisies and the wind-flowers of Giovoli. 

At her feet lay a youth, whose hands held a change of 
tapers ready to tip her wand afresh should she be vanquished ; 
every now and then he gave her a knot of roses or lilies of the 
valley that she asked for; always he was looking upward to 
her face. 

The river of fire ran unheeded by him ; the feast of folly 
had its wild way unshared by him ; he saw only her, — as the 
hot, changeful light shone over her laughing eyes and mouth, 
and her shining throat, whiter than the pearls that clasped 

it. 

He was screened from the sight of the multitude by the 
draperies of the balustrade ; but as he raised himself on his 
arms to give her flowers, Bruno’s gaze found him. 

Bruno’s hand went to the knife in his waist-belt, and, with 
a curse, thrust it back again. 

That could not reach the smiling thing throned up there on 
high. 

He wished that he had never burned that deadly fair weapon 
which had been broken up and destroyed in his haste. 

His eyes devoured her with that hate which is deep as lava 
and as ruthless : he thought of one day when he had seen her, 
a little, white, new-born thing, lying at her mother's toil-worn 
breast, and poor improvident Sandro, gleeful and rueful at 
another branch to his roof-tree and another mouth to feed, had 
said, — 

“Such a white child! — so white! Heaven send her a 
white soul, too ! We will bring her up to the cloister-life. 
When one has so many, one can spare one to God !” 

So Sandro had said, — a faulty man, but loving his children 
and hating shame. 

And the white child was here. 

Some roses fell through from the rails of her balcony, — 


SIGNA. 


481 


winter roses, fair and rare. A boy, whose rags were covered 
with a goatskin, and who wore a mask of Bacchus grinning 
from ear to ear, as though life were one long wine- song, caught 
them eagerly, as boys do all such things in Carnival ; then, 
seeing where they came from, threw them under his feet and 
stamped on them and spit on their scattered leaves. 

Bruno saw, and felt for a coin to reward the lad that hated 
her. 

“ Why do you hate her ?” he asked. 

“ She let her horse lame my brother a month ago, — he, a 
little child ; and she laughed and drove on, saying never a 
word, and Lili with both feet jammed and bleeding in the 
dust. If she were a princess one would not mind ; but they 
say she was a beggar, like ourselves.” 

Bruno gave him money. 

“ Does she live up yonder ? — tell me ?” 

“No. She is there to see. I will show you her house 
when the sport is all over. You hate her too ?” 

Bruno was silent. 

He was watching the flame of her wand as it played, seem- 
ing to lick her cheek and her throat, while the shadows above 
enfolded her softly like a cloud. There were many faces 
round her ; one was the face which had been like the face of 
the sleeping Endymion, but there were no dreams there now ; 
it was haggard with the exhaustion of passion, hectic, wasted, 
with all the beautiful youthfulness of it burned away, as the 
bloom of a flower is consumed in the heat of a lamp ; in the 
eyes were the hunger of jealousy, the hunger which drives 
out all other sense as the famine of the body kills the mind. 

With a loud cry Bruno flung his arms upward towards the 
boy he loved. 

The great city, the strange crowds, the blazing fires, faded 
from his sight; he had no eyes except for Pippa’s son.^ But 
his shout was drowned in the uproar of the screaming multi- 
tude ; the close-packed throngs swept with one movement out- 
ward to where the colored fires were blazing and roaring from 
the Place of the People, around the great obelisk of Egypt ; 
he was borne off his feet, wedged in, hemmed round, carried 
and forced by the rushing tide of human life away from the 
spot where the White Child played with fire ; he lost his con- 
sciousness for a moment in the great roar and pressure of the 
Y 41 


482 


SIGN A. 


overwhelming mass. When he came to himself, he had been 
pushed upward into the square under the domes of the church 
raised to lay the ghost of Nero ; all was dark ; the sport was 
over ; the throngs were still dense, the horses of the city guard 
were slowly scattering them ; there were no lights, except the 
quiet stars above in the cloudless skies. 

The boy in the goatskin was by him, and looked at him 
curiously. 

“ They hit you on the head ; not meaning. You would 
have fallen, I think, only the crowd was so close, it kept you 
upright ; yoii are a strong man. I ran with you because you 
- hate that woman, and you gave me money. Will you give me 
more ? Shall I show you where she lives ?” 

“ Ay ! — show me !” said Bruno, stupidly ; and by instinct, 
like a dog, stooped and drank from the hollow of his hand 
the water of the lion’s mouth. 

“ You are her father or her brother ?” said the boy ; “ you 
must be something to her, since you look like that. She is 
an evil one, — yes, that is sure. Did you see that lad with her, 
the one with the great dark eyes and the girl’s face? That is 
the one who makes all that great music. He will make no 
more. Not he.” 

And the boy turned a somersault on the stones under the 
stars, and flung his Bacchus mask up in the starlight. 

“ He is good,” said the lad, when his somersault was ended, 
and he dipped his mask in the fountain, and drank from it, 
and spit it out again, because water was not wine. “ He is 
good. When Dili was lamed that day, he came and found us 
out, and gave us money, and spoke soft words ; and there was 
an old lute of Dili’s lying there, and he took it up and made 
it sound so, — one would have said the angels were all singing ; 
and then, all in a minute, he put it down, and tears were in 
his eyes, and he went, — so, — saying nothing more. But he 
sent to us often ; only Dili always says — since that — the lute 
seems dumb.” 

Bruno gave him more money. 

“ Show me where,” he said. 

Tlie boy pressed through the loosening crowd, and bade him 
follow. 

They went through many a narrow street, solitary and dark, 
until all the noise of the multitude was left behind them, and 


SIGNA. 


483 


they even ceased to see the stray noisy groups of the straggling 
maskers. 

“ Why should he play no more?” said Bruno, suddenly, in 
the stillness. The words were haunting him. 

“ That is what the city says,” answered the boy, who went 
leaping and turning in endless gyrations, a ghastly figure in 
the moon-rays and the shadows, in his satyr’s garb and with 
his wine-god’s head. 

“ The city says it? Why?” 

Bruno felt stupid still ; a falling torch had struck him on 
the head, and he had fasted long, and all his heart and soul 
were sick with hopelessness. 

“ Because it is dead, — gone out of him ! that is what they 
say. She killed it, — just for sport. Why not? That is what 
she would ask : Why not ?” And the boy whirled like a 
wheel in the gloom under the beetling houses. 

“Why not?” said Bruno, as a rock might give back an 
echo sullenly. 

There arose near them iron gates, and high black walls, and 
the heads of palm-trees. The boy pointed to them. 

“ There it is. Pay me.” 

At that moment wheels were heard ; horses foaming and 
plunging passed them ; the gates opened ; the mud from the 
winter rains struck Bruno in the face. 

“ That is she,” said the boy in the mask of Bacchus. 

The gates closed, shutting her in. Bruno wiped the mud 
from his mouth. 

He put the money in the child’s hand again, and bade him 

“ He was with her,” said the boy, with his white teeth 
shining through the wide jaws of his mask. “ She has not 
done with him yet. She maddens him with jealousy and pain. 
She cheats him always, — and them all. It must be brave 
sport to be a woman.” 

Bruno bade him begone. 

The little lad ran off, but, once more lingering, returned. 

“Do not hurt him,” he said, again, and then reluctantly 
went away, a quaint, small, faun-like figure in the moon-rays. 

Bruno remained by the closed gates. He sat down on the 
stone coping of the wall and wrapped his cloak around him. 
It was now the tenth hour. 


484 


SIGNA, 


There was no sound, except from a fountain that was within 
the gates and of the night-wind among the palm-trees. He 
had no hope ; all was dark. He could not see why God dealt 
thus with him. His heart hardened against earth and heaven. 

To behold the dominion of evil, the victory of the liar, the 
empire of that which is base ; to be powerless to resist, impo- 
tent to strip it bare ; to watch it suck under a beloved life as 
the whirlpool the gold-freighted vessel ; to know that the 
soul for which we would give our own to everlasting ruin is 
daily, hourly, momentarily subjugated, emasculated, possessed, 
devoured by those alien powers of violence and fraud which 
have fastened upon it as their prey ; to stand by fettered and 
mute, and cry out to heaven that in this conflict the angels 
themselves should descend to wrestle for us, and yet know 
that all the while the very stars in their courses shall sooner 
stand still than this reign of sin be ended : — this is the greatest 
woe that the world holds. 

Beaten, we shake in vain the adamant gates of a brazen 
iniquity ; we may bruise our breasts there till we die ; there 
is no entrance possible. For that which is vile is stronger 
than all love, all faith, all pure desire, all passionate pain ; that 
which is vile has all the forces that men have called the powers 
of hell. 


CHAPTER LIII. 

A GREAT bell clanging within the iron gates jarred on the 
silence. 

He looked up ; there was a man there by his side without 
who rang the bell thus. 

A voice answered the stranger’s demand through a grated 
wicket. Was she within? No; she was not within. 

Bruno opened his lips to say that they lied ; but kept back 
the words unuttered : the other was naught to him. 

“ I raised her from the very dust, and have to ring at her 
gates like a beggar,” the stranger muttered, with tones too 
low for Bruno’s ear to hear them ; then he turned and went 
away unwillingly. The moon fell full upon him. He saw 


SIGNA. 


485 


the motionless dark figure of the peasant leaning by the wall. 
He looked, and spoke : 

“ Is it you who dread Argol ? What do you do here?” 

“ What do you?” said Bruno ; his mouth scarcely unclosed, 
his whole heart and soul were full of frozen pain ; his hand 
was against every man’s ; he would have struck a child dead, 
or have spat upon the cross. What use were man or Grod ? 
Where was there justice ? 

He looked at the stranger sullenly ; who rang at her gates 
must be her friend — his foe. 

The moon had risen fully, and shone with that pure and 
dreamful light which takes two thousand years of age away 
from Rome ; the moonlight in which they say the dead gods 
rise and walk, weeping. 

The face of the man was turned to him in it ; a fair proud 
face, with something arrogant and something gentle, and the 
eyes of a poet and the lips of a cynic. 

Bruno stared on him, wondering, doubting, remembering, 
then ground his teeth as a mastilf would at sight of what he 
loathed, and sprang erect. 

“ Wait ! I know you,” he said, slowly. You are the painter 
— Istriel.” 

“ Yes,” said the other, with a careless smile, as of one whose 
name meant homage. He was known so well by princes and 
by people. It seemed nothing strange. 

“ I meant to look for you. Wait there,” said Bruno. “ Oh, 
I went and read your face, line by line, in the city where you 
have painted it ; I meant to deal with you one day, — and yet, 
yonder, it was so dark there, you escaped me. Oh, I know 
you now.” 

He spoke savagely, with his teeth set, still staring upon 
Istriel. Startled, the other looked, and kept his ground ; he 
was a bold man, and knew that in his life he had sown enemies 
broadcast. This might be one of them. 

“ So you come to ring at her gates ?” said Bruno. “ When 
you shared her with all the world, were you not sick of her ? 
You great men are less squeamish than we peasants are. 
When we throw the rotten fruit away, we have done with it. 
Do you know what Sandro said when she came to the birth ? 
‘ Such a white child, — so white ! God send her a white soul, 
too !’ That is what he said ; and he died looking at the little 

41 * 


486 


SIGNA. 


white plaster Christ on the wall, and saying, ‘ I had a white 
child, too : has the Holy Mother got her safe ? Shall 1 
see her the other side of the sun ?’ That is what he died 
saying ” 

“ I do not understand,” said Istriel. 

Bruno laughed aloud. 

“ No, no doubt : why should you? You take the loveliest, 
vilest thing you own, and strip it bare, and smile, and paint it 
so, and send it out to all the multitudes : that is genius. You 
go down to hell and bring a curse up from it, and throw it 
out broadcast among the living people : that is genius. You 
have cursed my boy. Ten thousand others, too, for aught I 
know. But his was the gentlest, purest, sweetest soul that 
lived, and came so fresh from heaven that he brought all 
heaven’s music with him in his ear and in his mouth, and was 
forever hearing it and making others hear it. I have seen 
fierce men fighting cease and grow quiet, only because the 
child passed, singing. Look you, the lizards would come from 
their holes, and the sheep and the goats stand listening round 
him, and the snakes lie still and quiet, in the sun there on the 
hills, because he piped upon his little lute, — the broken lute I 
gave him. He never hurt a living thing. When he was a 
young child, he would take scorpions in his hand and say that 
he was sorry for them, because they hated men and had no 
one to love them. That was my boy. It is of no use telling 
you ; how should you know, how should any one know, as I 
do? God sent him on to earth, I think, just to show what a 
human thing can be — how beautiful — when it has no greed 
and no vile thought. I labored for the land and got it, and 
then I lost that, and all was to begin over again ; and I could 
bear it, — somehow, — because he was safe, and things went well 
with him, and he had his heart’s desire ; and when he came 
home to me, though the world had got him, it had not hurt 
him, — not one whit, — nor did he forget or cease to care. But 
after he saw the accursed picture, then it was all over. There 
are women that have little white souls like doves, and when 
they enter the heart of a man it is with him as if the Holy 
Spirit were there, and they nestle in him, and keep him from 

evil ; but there are others your picture was accursed, I 

say. It bewitched him. It poured fire into him, — the fire 
that consumes the bones and the nerves and the brain. When 


SIONA. 


487 


a boy or a man loves a woman that is vile, he kisses corruption 
on the mouth.” 

“ That is true,” said the other. “ But what have I done 
to you, that you should upbraid me thus?” 

He did not understand in any way the fierce onslaught and 
the confused meanings of the unknown man who fronted and 
arraigned him in the moonlight ; but the rough eloquence of 
it fascinated him, and the courage and very rudeness of it and 
passionate pathos moved him to know more. 

“ You are a great man, that I hear,” answered Bruno, “and 
you spend your strength painting lewd women. I do not 
know. I suppose it seems good to you. For me, it looks a 
poor pastime. Those men of old that colored our walls, — 
they saw God and the saints, and the great deeds that were 
done when men were giants ; so they painted them. You 
paint what you see, I suppose. Is that what it is to have 
talents ? to make dancing wantons live unperishing and drive 
innocent souls mad with sick passions ? I praise heaven that 
I am a peasant and a fool. When you come to die, will it be 
well with you ? to see these women forever about your bed, 
and think of the young lives you have burned up with the 
teachings of wicked desire ? If my right hand could create 
such things as that Innocence of yours, I would cut my hand 
off rather than leave it its cunning.” 

“You are an ascetic,” said Istriel, with a smile. He was 
surprised at the fierce earnestness of this peasant, and was of 
that temper which will quarrel with nothing which is new to 
it and diverts it. 

“ I do not know what you mean,” said Bruno. “ I am a 
man, and have been a bad man. At least, they have always 
said so. But I would slay myself before I would pander to 
the vileness of the world as you do. God gives you that gift 
of yours, to make the likeness of his living things and give 
them more beauty than any real life has. And what do you 
do with it ? Make shameless women glow like the fire, and 
the rose, and the jewels of the kings, and drive pure souls to 
hell with longing for them. What are you better than a 
pander and a tempter? You might make men see heaven, 
and you will not. You are like a jewel in a toad’s head. Has 
all your learning taught you no greater thing? is there nothing 
on all the broad earth but a naked wanton ? For me, I have 


488 


SIONA. 


been a fool and a sinner with many a living woman in my 
time : that is the folly of all men ; there is nature in that, and 
good may come out of its evil ; but to set a vile creature up 
on high, and color every hue of her, and draw every line, and 
set her up in the midst of the people, and seem to say to them, 

‘ There is nothing in all the world to worship but only a beau- 
tiful body, with a foul cancer hid in it’ — since to do that is 
what they call genius, I praise Fate that made me unlettered 
and unlearned and sent me to dwell with my beasts at the 
plow.” 

The painter Istriel looked at him with greater intentness. 
The rough eloquence stirred a certain shame in him ; he knew 
that in it there was a grain of truth ; in his own youth he 
had had pure aspirations and spiritual aims, and he had de- 
scended to delight and stimulate with the matchless grace of 
his color and the vital power of his hand the sated materialism 
of his age. 

He recognized in the passionate imperfect words of the man 
before him the temper which had made the men of the Middle 
Ages hurl their marble bacchanals and painted sirens into the 
flames at Savonarola’s word. 

He was less offended than aroused. 

“What has any one of my pictures done to you ?” he asked. 
“ Men like you feel no impersonal pain. What is your per- 
sonal wrong at my hand ?” 

Bruno’s eyes glanced at him with a deep mute scorn. 

“ I do not know what you mean. Your wantons never hurt 
me. Only I would hew the wood you paint them on into a 
million pieces, and thrust them in the nearest kiln to burn to 
ashes, — if I could. From the time he saw that accursed thing 
all was altered with him. It got into him like wine, — like 
poison. It made him drunk. Before — he lived in all the 
sweet sounds he heard, just as a bird does in the leaves and 
the light. He was always hearing beautiful things, and seeing 
them ; we could not. He was so near the angels, — my boy ! 
But after he saw your accursed picture, it was the woman he 
saw, — always the woman; she got between him and God. Ho 
you not know ? And so, when she chose, she took him. It 
is like the plague. He looked with innocent eyes on your 
picture ; when he looked away, he knew that we are all beasts. 
Yes, that is what your genius does for men. It is great ; ah I 


SION A. 


489 


so is the marsh-fever, for it can kill a king if he pass by. 
Your picture has killed my boy. When he found it living, 
he fell down before it. You see. He has no brain, or soul, 
or memory, or beauty left ; all his dreams are dead ; he only 
sees your wanton. Because you played with a wretched thing 
like that, must you make her a public glory to lure men’s 
souls ? Why did you do it ? Was there not the sea, and 
the sun, and the children, and the face of the mountains, and 
all the wide world for you to make a likeness of and call all 
the nations to look ? Was the great blue sky too narrow for 
you, that you must needs go and make a devil-star out of the 
mud of the sewer ? Because the woman had no shame with 
you, must you crown her for that, and make others that look 
on her shameless ? Your hand is accursed ; your hand is 
accursed, I say. Were I lord and king, I would have it struck 
off in the sight of all the people. Look 1 the wanton you 
made takes my boy from me, from the world, from his art, 
from his God !” 

He paused abruptly ; he had spoken with broken impetuous 
passion ; the long-locked gates of his silence once burst asunder, 
all his heart rushed forth in his words; he smote wildly, like 
a blind man in the midst of foes. 

Istriel listened ; the wrath that rose in him was daunted by 
a vague trouble, a restless uncertain shame. 

“Whom do you speak of?” he said, with a wonder that 
held his wrath in check. “ Your boy ! is it possible that you 
mean the musician that they call Signa?” 

Bruno made a gesture of assent. 

Istriel was silent. 

In his soul he hated the young lover of his Innocence, — the 
beautiful boy who had youth, who had fame, who had her. 

“ What have I to do with that?” he said, bitterly. “ She 
takes a whim for him, a fancy of a month ; he thinks it heaven 
and eternity. She has ruined him. His genius is burned 
up ; his youth is dead ; he will do nothing more of any worth. 
Women like her are like the Indian drugs, that sleep and kill. 
How is that any fault of mine ? He could see the thing she 
was. If he will fling his soul away upon a creature lighter 
than thistle-down, viler than a rattlesnake’s poison, poorer and 
quicker to pass than the breath of a gnat, whose blame is that 
except his own ? There was a sculptor once, you know, that 

V* 


490 


SIQNA. 


fell to lascivious worship of the marble image he had made ; 
well, poets are not even so far wise as that. They make an 
image out of the gossamer rainbow stuff of their own dreams, 
and then curse heaven and earth because it dissolves to empty 
air in their fond arms. Whose blame is that ? The fools are 
made so ” 

He spoke with fierce curt scorn ; he too had loved this 
worthless loveliness that he had christened Innocence. 

“ It is as bad as that with him ?” muttered Bruno. “ It is 
true then all they say?” 

Istriel laughed. 

“ Most true. All Rome can read it. Her fancy is done ; 
and now his hell has come. It is always so. But what can 
it be to you? What is he to you ?” he said, abruptly. 

Bruno smiled, — a smile of the pale passion which is bitter 
as death, and deep as the bottomless sea. 

“ I have given him all my life,” he said, simply. “ All my 
life. And you and your wanton have destroyed him.” 

“ He is your son?” said Istriel. 

“ No. They all thought so, but they were wrong. He was 
Pippa’s son,” said Bruno, whose mind was clouded with the 
force and fury of his pain, and who at all times had the peas- 
ant’s opticism, and believed that every one must know, with- 
out need of explanation, who he was, and what he meant, and 
why he spoke. 

“ Pippa !” echoed Istriel. His memories were wakened by 
the name, and went back to the days of his youth, when he 
had gone through the fields at evening, when the purple bean- 
flower was in bloom. 

“ What is your name, then ?” he asked, with a changed 
sound in his voice, and with his fair cheek paler. 

“I am Bruno Marcillo ; I come from the hills above the 
Lastra a Signa.” 

Istriel rose and looked at him ; he had not remembered dead 
Pippa for many a year. All in a moment he did remember : 
the long light days ; the little gray-walled town ; the meetings 
in the vine-hung paths, when sunset burned the skies ; the 
girl with the pearls on her round brown throat ; the moonlit 
nights, with the strings of the guitar throbbing, and the hearts 
of the lovers leaping; the sweet, eager, thoughtless passion 
that swayed them one to another, as two flowers are blown to- 


SIGNA. 


491 


gether in the mild soft winds of summer : he remembered it 
all now. 

And he had forgotten so long; forgotten so utterly; save 
now and then, when in some great man’s house he had chanced 
to see some painting done in his youth, and sold then for a 
few gold coins, of a tender tempestuous face, half smiling and 
half sobbing, full of storm and sunshine, both in one ; and 
then at such times had thought, “ Poor little fool ! she loved 
me too well ; — it is the worst fault a woman has.” 

Some regret he had felt^ and some remorse, when he had 
found the garret empty, and had lost Pippa from sight in the 
great sea of chance ; but she had wearied him, importuned 
him, clung to him ; she had had the worst fault, she had loved 
him too much. He had been young, and poor, and very am- 
bitious ; he had been soon reconciled ; he had soon learned to 
think that it was a burden best fallen from his shoulders. No 
doubt she had suffered ; but there was no help for that, — some 
one always suffered when these ties were broken, — so he had 
said to himself. And then there had come success and fame, 
and the pleasures of the world and the triumphs of art, and 
Pippa had dropped from his thoughts as dead blossoms from 
a bough ; and he had loved so many other women that he 
could not have counted them ; and the memory of that boy- 
and-girl romance in the green hill-country of the old Etruscan 
land had died away from him like a song long mute. 

Now, all at once, Pippa’s hand seemed to touch him, Pippa’s 
voice seemed to rouse him, Pippa’s eyes seemed to look at him. 

This was Bruno, then ? — the great, dark, elder brother, 
whom she had feared, and had often pointed out to him in the 
fading evening light from afar on the hill-sides, and had begged 
him never to meet, lest there should be feud about her, and 
bloodshed. 

This was Bruno. 

All in a moment the past leaped up to him, and grew fresh 
as yesterday. 

This was Bruno ; and what, then, was the boy? 

He mastered the horror and the emotion which possessed 
him ; but his mouth was dry and his voice was unsteady, as 
he asked, — 

“ She was your sister — Pippa ?” 

“ Yes.” 


492 


SIGNA. 


\ 


“ Is she dead, then ?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ When did she die ?” 

“ On the night of the flood, in the dark, we found her dead, 
Lippo and I. The child was at her breast. She had fallen 
from the edge of the road. She could tell us nothiog. What 
is it to you ? Why do you want to know ?” 

Istriel was silent a moment ; a shiver as of some great cold 
went over him. Then he spoke suddenly : 

“ Because I was her lover. I took her from your country. 
That lad, if he be hers, is mine. She loved me too well to 
be faithless. There are women so.” 

Bruno stared at him stupidly. The sense of what he heard 
was long before it reached him or brought perception of its 
truth. Then all at once he understood. 

“ It will kill him !” he muttered, at last ; “ it will kill him ! 
Do you not see ?” 

With a shudder, Istriel looked him slowly in the face. 

Remembering the boy, their mutual thoughts dulled passion, 
numbed rage, and struck them mute. 

Bruno’s hand, raised to strike the lover of dead Pippa, fell 
to his side nerveless and strengthless as a reed that is plucked 
upward by the roots. 


CHAPTER LIV. 

“ Let me think ! let me breathe !” said Bruno, and he 
staggered farther out into the darkness, gasping for air. 

The horror of an inevitable, irrevocable destiny closed in 
on him like a cage of iron. 

There are hours in the lives of men when the old Grreek 
sense of being but the sport of an inexorable Fate, from which 
there is no possible escape, sweeps away all hope and power 
of self-help, and strikes all courage blinded to the dust. 

What could he do ? 

The powers of heaven and hell were alike against him, — 
so he thought. 


SIGN A. 


493 


He was no god t(f struggle with this ghastly curse of risen 
years, these prison-mists of perished passions. 

It was no fault of his. 

His hands were innocent, his soul was free of guilt ; yet he 
suffered as the guilty do not. It is often so. 

There was a sound as of many waters in his ears ; the white 
moon and the curled palm-leaves went round and round ; the 
great stones seemed to heave beneath his feet. 

He saw the face of the man before him as in a mist, blood- 
red. 

“ Get you gone,” he muttered, “ get you gone. You have 
no share with him. For you, he would have drowned, like 
any lamb that the flood took. He is mine, — mine, — mine. 
My hands worked for him ; my bread fed him ; my roof shel- 
tered him. He was naught to you. You have lived your life 
and never thought. He is naught to you ; he is mine. Get 
you gone !” 

And he struck at the air — blindly. 

The other shrank away before that great just passion, — 
shrank, palsied and awed, in all his proud vain manhood, as 
though old age had seized him. He had dropped the serpent’s 
tooth of a careless love by the wayside, and thought no more ; 
and now an armed host sprang on him. 

“ But — to save him ?” he murmured, and was still. 

Bruno stood erect, and in the changing shadows his form 
seemed to tower and dilate and grow to giant’s stature. 

“ Leave him to me,” he cried ; and his voice rolled like 
thunder down the deserted ruined ways of Borne. “ He is 
mine ! he is mine ! My soul for his, — that I have said, — 
always, — always, — while you feasted, and were famous, and 
kissed your wantons, and took no thought. Get you gone ; get 
you gone. You gave him your life ; but I gave him my soul.” 

The other shrank back into the shadows. 

Bruno stood silent, with his face to the stars. 

“ Is there a God there ?” he cried to them. “ Is there a 
God, that he lets the innocent suffer for the guilty ?” 

The serene star-covered heavens seemed chill as any vault 
of ice. What cared they for his pain ? 

It was no blasphemy in him that cried thus, and thus 
doubted ; it was faith in its death-agony ; the faith of David’s, 
“ Lord, I believe : help thou mine unbelief.” 

42 


494 


SIGNA. 


He was alone in the pale night. 

The lover of dead Pippa, who had never feared anything 
in life, feared him. 

“ Is it all of no use?” muttered Bruno to the silence ; and 
silence answered him. Was it all of no use? — the long years 
of toil ; the patient sacrifice ; the unceasing resistance of sel- 
fish desire ; the bitter winters ; the burning summers ; the 
effort ; the anxiety ; the prayers ; the love ? 

Was it all of no use? Did neither men nor Grod care 
anything ? 

That unutterable and terrible loneliness which comes to all 
in their death-hour and comes to some in their full height of 
life encompassed Bruno now. 

It seemed to him as if he stood solitary amidst the wreck 
of the whole world. 

He had tried to build up in safety the temple of this young 
life, so that every fair and pure thing might be garnered 
therein, and no foul spirits ever enter ; he had been willing to 
cement its corner-stone with his heart’s blood, and by the 
sweat of his labor, and by the pain of his perishing hopes, 
purchase a blessing upon it. And now it burned and crumbled 
before his sight, blasted with the lightning of a hideous pas- 
sion. And he stood by, with bound hands. 

“ My soul for his,” he muttered. That he had said always; 
that he would give still ; only it seemed to him that there was 
no way to force on fate such barter. 

It is not given to any life to be the providence of another : 
so the old man had told him in the sacristy of the Lastra, 
and he found the truth now. 

A great sickness came on him, a loathing of life and of the 
hopes with which he had cheated himself through these twenty 
long years of vain sacrifices. 

He seemed to feel the long wet hair of dead Pippa, and the 
cold of her lifeless breasts. Was it an hour ago that they 
had found her by the old sea-road, or was it twenty years ? 

He stood stunned and stupid in the silent ways of Borne. 

A great darkness was over all his mind, like the plague of 
that unending night which brooded over Egypt. 

All the ferocity of his nature was scourged into its greatest 
strength ; he was sensible of nothing except the sense that he 
was beaten in the one aim and purpose of his life. 


SIGNA. 


495 


Only — if by any chance he could still save the boy. 

That one thought — companion with him, sleeping and wak- 
ing through so many joyless nights — stayed with him still. 

It seemed to him that he would have strength to scale the 
very heights of heaven, and shake the very throne of God 
until He heard, to save the boy. 

The night was far gone ; the red of the day-dawn began to 
glow, and the stars paled. 

He did not know how time went ; but he knew the look of 
the daybreak. When the skies looked so through his grated 
windows at home, he rose, and said a prayer, and went down 
and unbarred his doors, and led out his white beasts to the 
plow or between the golden lines of the reaped corn. All that 
was over now. The birds were waking on the old green hills 
. and the crocus flowers unclosing ; but he 

“ I shall never see it again, ” he thought, and his heart 
yearned to it, and the great hot slow tears of a man’s woe 
stole into his aching eyes and burned them. But he had no 
pity on himself. 

He had freedom and health and strength and manhood, and 
he was still not old, and still might win the favor of women, 
and see his children laugh, — if he went back to the old home- 
stead and the old safe ways of his fathers. And the very 
smell of the earth there was sweet to him as a virgin’s breath, 
and the mere toil of the ground had been dear to him by 
reason of the faithful love that he bore to his birthplace. But 
he had no pity on himself. 

“ My soul for his,” he had said ; and he cleaved to his word 
and kept it. 

In his day he had been savage to others. He was no less 
so to himself. 

He had done all that he knew how to do. He had crushed 
out the natural evil of him, and denied the desires of the flesh, 
and changed his very nature, to do good by Pippa’s son ; and 
it had all been of no use ; it had all been spent in vain, as 
drowning seamen’s cries for help are spent on angry winds and 
yawning waters. He had tried to follow God’s will and to 
drive the tempter from him, for the boy’s sake ; and it had all 
been of no avail. Through the long score of years his vain 
sacrifices echoed dully by him, as a dropped stone through the 
dark shaft of a well. 


496 


SIQNA. 


Perhaps it was not enough. 

Perhaps it was needful that he should redeem the boy’s 
soul by the utter surrender and eternal ruin of his own, — 
perhaps. After all, it was a poor love which balanced cost, — 
a meek, mean love which would not dare take guilt upon it for 
the thing it cherished. 

To him crime was crime in naked utter blackness, without 
aught of those palliatives with which the cultured and philo- 
sophic temper can stroke it smooth and paint its soft excuse 
and trace it back to influence or insanity. To him sin was 
a mighty, hideous, hell-born thing, which being embraced 
dragged him who kissed it on the mouth, downward and down- 
ward into bottomless pits of endless night and ceaseless torment. 
To him the depths of hell and heights of heaven were real as 
he had seen them in the visions of Orcagna. 

Yet he was willing to say, “ Evil, be thou my good,” if by 
such evil he could break the bonds of passion from the life of 
Pippa’s son. 

He had in him the mighty fanaticism which has made at 
once the tyrants and the martyrs of the world. 

“ Leave him to me,” he had said, and then the strength, and 
weakness, and ruthless heat, and utter self-deliverance of his 
nature leaped to their height, and nerved him with deadly 
passion. 

“ There is but one way,” he said to himself; — there was 
but one way to cut the cords of this hideous, tangled knot of 
destiny, and let free the boy to the old ways of innocence. 

“ He will curse me,” he thought; “ I shall die, never looking 
on his face, never hearing his voice. But he will be freed — 
so. He will sufier, — for a day, — a year. But he will be 
spared the truth. And he is so young, — he will be glad again 
before the summer comes.” 

For a moment his courage failed him. 

He could face the thought of an eternity of pain, and not 
turn pale, nor pause. But to die with the boy’s curse on him, 
— that was harder. 

“ It is selfishness to pause,” he told himself “ He will 
loathe me always ; but what matter ? — he will be saved ; he 
will be innocent once more ; he will hear his ‘ beautiful things’ 
again ; he will never know the truth ; he will be at peace with 
himself, and forget before the summer comes. He never has 


SIQNA, 


497 


loved me, — not much. What does it matter — so that he is 
saved ? When he sees his mother in heaven some day, then 
she will say to him, ‘ It was done for your sake.’ And I shall 
know that he sees then, as God sees. That will be enough.” 

And he refused to have pity on himself, and hardened 
his heart, and faced the red of the breaking day with his re- 
solve stronger and firmer in his soul, till he seemed to himself 
to be no more a man with nerves to wound and heart to suffer, 
but a thing of iron set to vengeance as a clock is wound to 
strike. 

There was no other way, — that was what he thought ; no 
other way to turn the boy to innocence, and spare him ever 
any knowledge of the truth. 

The same terrible sense of crime as duty which of old 
nerved the hands of Judith and of Jael came on him now. 
In the great blindness that was upon him it seemed to him 
that to shrink from this act set to him would be the feeblest 
cowardice. It seemed to him that all the forces of Satan were 
at war with him, and that not to strike them down and crush 
them out would be to pander to and aid them, and shrink, a 
craven, from their path. 

The passion which makes tyrannicides was in him now. 

“ I have lived righteously, and no good has come of it,” he 
said to himself. “ If crime can save him, crime shall be 
sweeter to me than all virtue.” 

That was all he felt, — dully, savagely, hopelessly, with that 
despair upon him which is irresponsible as madness. 

He had given all his manhood to the boy, and surrendered 
all the hopes and ties and pleasures and tender follies which 
make the toil of manhood bearable, and soften creeping age 
of half its terrors, and one after another alien forces had arisen 
and taken the thing he had labored for away from him. 

His heart was hard. His blood was fire. Fate had been 
merciless and God been deaf. He grew merciless too, and 
stopped his ears to pity. 

Pity ! 

Where was there any in all this wide world ? The fiend 
sent a creature on to earth with a wooing mouth and a white 
body, and she ate up youth and innocence and all pure desires 
and all high endeavors, and devoured souls as swine the gar- 
bage ; and from heaven there was never any sign. 

42 ^ 


498 


SIGNA, 


The young day grew wider and brighter and redder in the 
sky. Nightingales sang in the gardens on the other side of 
the high walls. The wind rose fragrant with the smell of wet 
grass-ways and of the laden orange-boughs. He noticed no- 
thing. The time had gone by with him when any sight or 
sound had power on him. He only waited, — waited silently, 
— drawn back within the shadow of the walls. 

With the full morning the bolts of the gates were drawn 
back ; then came forth a young man with a face strange to 
him, and rich garments, and a smile of triumph on his mouth ; 
a little later came a woman with great buckets on her shoulders, 
going to fetch water from the fountain in the public square a 
street or two beyond. 

He, waiting for such a moment’s favoring chance, went 
within. The fresh dark gardens were deserted. There was a 
stone terrace with two flights of steps ; winged lions ; and 
grim marble masks. He ascended the stairs, and pushed back 
some great doors which were unlatched within. They yielded 
to his hand. He entered the silent house. 

Two or three servants, drowsy or drunken, lay about on the 
couches in the great vaulted entrance, whose white and red 
marbles gleamed in the golden glory of the slanting sun-rays. 

One of them raised himself sleepily, and stopped him with 
a stupid smile. 

“ Where do you go ? — what would you do ?” 

Bruno pushed him aside. 

“I go to my work,” he answered, and passed onward. The 
other, muttering, dropped back again into his vinous rest. 

Bruno went on. Long corridors, empty banqueting-rooms, 
chambers rich with sculptures and with frescoes, deserted splen- 
dors where the flowers were fading and the morning shining 
through the crevices of closed shutters, all followed one on an- 
other like the tombs of dead Etruscan kings. All the house- 
hold slept, after the long, gay, amorous vigil of the night. He 
traversed the silent places as a living man traverses the soli- 
tude of sepulchres. He had no knowledge where to find the 
thing he sought ; but he went on without a pause ; he had 
grasped Evil by the hand ; it guides unerringly. 

His bare feet smote the bare marble and trod on, inexorable 
as the tread of time. After many chambers, — the vast, beauti- 
ful painted chambers of Rome, lofty as temples, and cool as the 


SIGNA. 


499 


deep sea, — he saw a door closed, with garlands of roses bloom- 
ing on its panels under the morning sunbeams. 

He thrust his strength against it ; it resisted a moment, then 
gave way and opened noiselessly; a fierce exultant joy leaped 
up in his heart like a sudden flame ; he had found his goal. 

Here no daylight came ; a little lamp was burning, a Cupid 
swung it from a chain ; there was deep color in the shadows 
everywhere ; the gloom of the place was filled with aromatic 
odors. 

He paused neither for the loveliness nor the stillness of it ; 
he went through its fragrant darkness with the same slow calm 
steps. As destiny comes to men to strike, unhasting but un- 
resting, so he went to her. 

He paused a moment and looked on her. Her bed was 
white as sea-foam is ; it rose and sank like billows under her ; 
her loosened hair half covered her ; her arms were cast above 
her head ; her limbs were lightly crossed ; she was one of those 
women who are most beautiful in sleep ; and her sleep was 
soft and smiling and profound in its repose, as when she had 
slumbered on the nest of hay by Palma’s side in the old hut 
at Giovoli. In her disarray, in her abandonment, in her deep 
dreamless rest, she was like a white rose just ruffled with the 
dew and wind and shutting all the summer in its breast. 

He stood and looked on her. 

In her nude beauty she was to him sexless ; in her perfect 
loveliness she was to him loathsome. 

She was no woman ; but all the evil, all the wrong, all the 
injustice, and all the mockery of human life made manifest in 
the flesh in her. 

He stood and looked on her ; at her red closed mouth, at 
her fair curled limbs, at her soft breast that rose and fell with 
the even measures of her peaceful breath. 

Then he leaned forward and drew his knife from his belt, 
and, stooping, stabbed her through the heart, — again and 
again and again, — driving each stroke farther home. 

She quivered a moment, then was still; she passed from 
sleep to death. 

He went out, no man staying him, or asking him anything, 
into the broad bright daylight of the outer air. 

“ It was for him,” he said in his thoughts, and a great 
serenity was with him as of some duty done. 


500 


SIONA, 


Man would slay him, and God would bid him burn in hell 
forever : — what matter ? — the boy was saved. 

He went on, erect, in the full sunshine. J ustice was done. 

A deep, fierce, exultant calm was on him. He would perish, 
— ^body and soul, — but the boy was saved. 

In the streets there were many people, and the multitudes 
were silent and afraid, and there was a sound as of weeping 
among women, and the stir and the press grew greater at each 
step ; and through the crowds there was brought out in the 
living light of the joyous day an open bier; men followed 
mourning as once they followed Raffaelle. 

“ What is it ?” he asked, and paused, for a great fear fell 
upon him. 

A woman answered him. 

“ His wanton was faithless, look you, and last night alone 
he knew it. So he slew himself. Why not ? She had killed 
all his soul in him. When Love is dead, one’s body best dies 
too.” 

They brought the bier through the weeping crowds. 

The face was uncovered to the light. It was the face of 
Signa. 

They had folded his hands on his breast, and his eyes were 
closed as in slumber. 

Love had killed him. 

Why not ? It is the only mercy that Love ever has. 


CHAPTER LV. 

In a warm cloudless morning, with the scent of wild flowers 
upon the wind, when the summer had drawn near, and the 
world was filled with life and light, they brought Bruno out 
into the public place of Rome to meet his death. 

He was quite silent. He had been always silent. 

When the sun smote his eyes, and the wind blew on his 
face, he shivered a little, that was all. 

“ It was all of no use,” he muttered. “ It was all of no 
use.” 

He mounted the scafibld with a firm step. He was un- 


SIGN A. 


501 


conscious what he did, but courage remained an instinct with 
him. 

Priests could do naught for him. He repelled them. He 
had no remorse. 

“ I did what I could,” he said in his heart. “ But it was 
all of no use, — of no use.” 

He looked a moment at the blue sky, at the fair sailing 
clouds, at the hills which rose between him and his old home ; 
then he surrendered himself. 

They bared his throat. 

“ Pray for your soul,” said some voice in his ear. 

He looked straight upward at the sun. 

“ Let my soul burn forever !” he said. “ Save the boy’s.” 

That was his prayer. 

Then he bowed his head, and knelt. 

The axe fell. 

They flung his body in a ditch, and threw the quicklime 
on it, and the heavy earth. 

That was the end. 

The hills lie quiet and know no change ; the winds wander 
among the white arbutus-bells and shake the odors from the 
clustering herbs ; the stone-pines scent the storm ; the plain 
outspreads its golden glory to the morning light ; the sweet 
chimes ring ; the days glide on ; the splendors of the sunsets 
burn across the sky, and make the mountains as the jeweled 
thrones of gods. 

Signa, hoary and old, stands there unchanged ; beholding the 
sun shine alike on the just and on the unjust. 

Why not? 

Signa can count her age by many centuries. Before the 
Latins were, she knew Etruria ; but, many as be her memories, 
she remembers no other thing than this, there is no justice that 
she knows of anywhere. Signa is wise. She lets this world 
go by ; and sleeps. 


THE END. 


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